Carol, It is a shame about the weeds and grass, but I understand completely. Sometimes when the weather is uncooperative, we have to take drastic measures just to survive the season. There are years (like this one) where I think we all have a day or two where we wonder "what's the point of even trying to have a garden"? But, then we get over it and do whatever we have to do to salvage the gardening year. Lisa, As much rain as you had, it is a wonder your WS plants weren't just floating down the road. Are these for the plant sale you mentioned earlier? Diane, Hooray for the chicken coop! I've been weeding too and I am sick of it. However, the weeded and remulched parts look great. It is just that there is so much left to be done, and I dread weeding the corn beds because the weeds in there are so thick. The corn is still off color, so I'm waiting to see if it recovers before I bother weeding. The lower corn bed, where I planted Country Gentleman, still has that mucky sour soil smell, so I don't know what to expect. It's been totally saturated for 3 weeks. The upper corn bed, where I planted a small patch of Texas Honey June is drier and looks a little better. Doesn't it feel great to be out in the sunshine, gardening again? And, finally, true confession time here: the fire pagers went off about 30 or 45 minutes ago. I listened to the call, and then I said to myself "I'm not going. This is my week in the garden and I'm not going anywhere for anybody." And, I didn't. Anyway, they are going to a buiness location for a long, tedious call (bomb threat) and that business usually provides drinks for them on these types of things. I'm staying home and in the garden. In fact, there is nothing this week that is going to drag me out of the garden, other than the occasional need to come inside and eat a meal or a snack, or maybe throw a load of laundry in the washer. Dawn...from clear and sunny Marietta where it is 77 degrees at this moment and is just PERFECT!

Posyplanter, Well, I am referring more in general to the type of soil but if you find a particular spot where they're happy, I think you could grow them there every year. In general, sweet potatoes are very disease-resistant and very few pests bother them in a home garden. So, I grow mine in one of two places (or, sometimes, in both those places) every year and don't really engage in crop rotation since there's little worry that either pests or diseases would build up in the soil. I add compost to the beds every fall/winter to put nutrition back into the soil, but since they're sweet potato beds and rich soil isn't needed/desirable for them, not too much compost....about an inch of compost goes into the sandy soil beds annually. In my case, I really couldn't rotate anyway. We have very thick and dense, brick-red clay that, even when well-amended, is too heavy for sweet potatoes. There is one narrow vein of sandy soil about 30' feet wide that cuts from north to south across our property and runs maybe 60'. Most of that area has trees in it, but I have carved out two small beds between those trees and my main vegetable garden and those beds are reserved for sweet potatoes. To rotate them, I'd have to move them to a raised bed of heavy, improved clay and I'd rather leave them in the sandy soil. I suppose if I ever have problems in the sandy soil, I'll have to either move them to clay the next growing season or skip growing them for a year. By the way, I have been in touch with my sweet potato slip provider this weekend and he tells me it has been a very bad year nationwide for planting sweet potatoes. Remember how wet last year was? Well, lots of commercial growers harvested the sweet potatoes just fine, but the potatoes held over to use as propagation stock for this year must have had either too high of a water content or were harboring some disease (commercial growers, because of monocropping, often see disease issues we home gardeners don't see). When the sweet potato slips were planted this spring, which also was abnormally wet in the sweet potato growing areas, many died and now sweet potato slips apparently are in short supply this year. That really makes me appreciate one of our local growers here in Oklahoma (Duck Creek Farms) even more because Gary did have sweet potato slips for sale this year so at least some of us were able to obtain some before we even knew they were in short supply nationwide. Sweet potatoes only store for maybe 2 to 3 months even in ideal conditions, so it is very difficult and a very complicated process for growers to keep sweet potato propagation stock alive from one fall to the following spring. Since our local grower is one of a small number of people seeking to bring back many heirloom varieties to the market here in the USA, it is especially important that he not lose his propagation stock. Sometimes, I think we home gardeners have it so easy...we buy stuff, plant it, grow it and harvest it and never realize the very hard work that is involved just in having something as 'simple' as sweet potato slips available for us to purchase. Seeing the struggles the commercial growers have gone through this spring with their sweet potato slips has given me a whole new appreciation for the fact that home gardeners like us can just buy slips and plant them. If we have to or want to, we can grow our own slips, but it is unlikely I'd be able to keep 20 heirloom varieties going over the winter every year without a greenhouse or something else. Dawn

I dug up ONE tuber a couple of weekends ago. I know there must be more, but I couldn't reach way down inside that planter box - it's about 4' deep. It was about 6" long and about 6" in circumference. Not too big, really. But I put it in my cabinet where I store my potatoes. Looks like a regular old sweet potatoe to me. Moni - yours is HUMONGOUS! Susan

One theory - is the humidity too low?