Sweet Potatoes

This is the initial setup. The row on the right (south side) is for sweet potatoes and the row on the left is for yellow onions. Set up using 1/2 black drip lines with DIG adjustable drippers (from Home Depot) spaced every two foot on the potatoes. Trenches are 10 foot long and one foot deep (about a shovel blade's depth), spaced four foot apart center to center. The sweet potato trench was filled with some somewhat predigested shredded cardboard and some peat moss in rather clay dense soil.

April 30

After three months of growth you can see melons growing in between the onions and sweet potatoes. The watermelons are pretty easy to identify, but I initially mistook the cantaloupe to be some kind of squash. I let it grow figuring I'd just rip it out later if I discovered it wasn't something I wanted. It turned out to be some of the best cantaloupe I've grown so far. I harvested at least five high quality melons off of it. The watermelon didn't fair so well. They grew to a good size, but I picked the them all too soon so all I got were immature bland melons :/

July 29

I estimate about a 10 to 15 lbs yield which filled a 5-gallon bucket. All this from two sweet potatoes bought from the local grocery store. Initially was planning on growing slips and planting those, but the slips weren't ready by May so I just planted the four sprouted tuber halves as is. If I had more time to develop the slips I probably could have gotten a much larger yield out of the two tubers. The harvest was good considering the soil wasn't in the best shape.

October 15

I watered for an hour or two every day for the first month, then cut back to every other day for several months. Watered really heavy once per week the last month before harvest. I imagine I could have watered once per week much earlier on, perhaps as early as a month after planting.