The Humble, Edible Sweet Potato Leaves

The importance of leafy greens in our diet is indisputable. The vitamins, minerals, fiber and phytochemicals
all working together to help us lose weight, keep our blood pressure down, control blood sugar and even fight some cancers among other wonderful health benefits, solidify the fact that we make room for them on our plate.

Growing up in Southern California, I remember having these these sweet potato vines just crawling all over the side of the house. My grandmother and mom would trim off a few of the tops and blanch them until wilted and ate it with a dash of fish sauce.. I couldn't remember hating them because quite honestly, I never bothered to try it. Having it as a side along with fried fish and some rice and they were very content. Not until I lived in Philippines with my wife that I actually started eating and enjoying this rather mild tasting leafy green.

Health is Wealth.

Now that we've established the health benefits, let's tie it all in. Moving out here to Florida, we talked about keeping it simple. The small place we were renting in Los Angeles didn't have room for even a small garden. Eating greens most of the time consisted of buying a bag of spinach for $3.00. Asian markets had a nice variety of greens but at the end of the day we started asking ourselves. How hard could it be to grow these ourselves? The 2 advantages would be A) we would never use pesticides and B) it would always be absolutely fresh. health AND wealth. so we did. went to the local Asian market and got a bunch of sweet potato leaves and ate most of it and the rest... stuck them in the ground. My wife just tilled the ground, stuck them in the ground about 2-3 inches deep and within a week or two they laid down their roots. They even survived the frost last month and now they're back to being green and healthy. Surprisingly enough, even with our soil here being so compacted and rocky, we even dug up a few sweet potatoes after only 5 months.

In the event that you don't have a handy Asian market to grab a bunch of sweet potato leaves, here's an excellent how-to on planting it right from the sweet potato.

http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-plant-and-grow-sweet-potatoes/index.html

Where we live, the home owner's association pretty much allows you to plant "decorative vegetation". Yes it's ridiculous, but for now, it is what we are dealing with.  If manicured lawns and useless sago palm trees are what they want...who are we to argue? On top of that, the lawn fertilizer drenched soil isn't something we want to grow our food in, which brings us to container planting. We were able to grab these small wooden crates at the Asian market for the whopping price of.....FREE. For this project, all we had to buy was the top soil. 40 lb bag for $1.28. Not too shabby.

Step 1. Spray down wooden crate with bleach water to make sure they're clean.

Step 2. Line crate with newspaper, cardboard, or hay. In this case we were able to pick up some hanging moss from the park. 

Step 3. Add a layer of top soil 

Step 4. Add a layer of compost. (I only had unfinished compost so this is my version of lasagna gardening.)

Step 5. Top off with top soil and trim off excess hanging moss.

Step 6. Transfer your greens. (here we have the sweet potatoes, river spinach and Chinese celery)

It's finally warming back up here in Florida so we figured we would get a head start on this planting season. We will also be starting our seedlings and will continue to update on how they are all doing. Thanks for coming by and we'll see you soon!