Digging for Sweet Potatoes
As we near the end of November, it’s still a crazy busy time of year for the garden. We are nearly finished transitioning from our summer-fallow fields to planted rows. That means weeding and prepping beds, transplanting, weeding, and continuing to start seedlings. And weeding….. It doesn’t always go as quickly as we’d like. We’re thankful for our two new adult interns, who are learning the ways of the garden and the harvest knife. And for our staff who are making a good start on teaching the entire process to our GrowCity Youth interns at both TFF sites. Jenny and Amanda (our adult interns at the TFF Parkway site) have just completed their first month of harvesting with us at the TFF site, while Will, Chris, and Sam have done the same at the Patricia Davis Community Garden, our second site in Pompano.
Brinkley and Rebecca, GrowCity Youth interns at the Parkway garden, harvested over 300 pounds of sweet potatoes from our summer garden to go into autumn and Thanksgiving meals. We planted those sweet potato slips in late spring and watched them grow and vine throughout the heat and humidity of our South Florida summer. Some of the tubers they harvested are massive, some are the shapes and sizes people are used to seeing at the grocery store, and some are smaller — a full range of sizes, shapes, and colors. We’ll go back through those rows for another look and see if we missed any — there always seem to be a few that get away from us and then start growing once we’ve replanted the row with its new crop….
Our fall fundraising seedling sale brought both old and new friends to the garden in support of our GrowCity Youth program. GrowCity Youth helped out, leading garden tours and carrying plants out to people’s cars. It was a lovely day seeing so many of our garden friends and meeting others new to the Fruitful Field. If you missed it, don’t worry — we plan a second sale for mid-December, coinciding with our GrowCity Youth graduation.
As always, the garden is thankful for our amazing volunteers. If you are interested in getting your hands dirty with us, we would love to see you! Come out to work with us on our monthly Volunteer Work Days (the third Saturday morning of each month 9 a.m. to noon). We also thank our more frequent volunteers, from those that come out each week for a few hours to help with weeding, watering, mowing, or other tasks — all the way up to our adult intern program of six scheduled hours per week to make our CSA program and veggie donations possible. There are always a range of projects that may connect with your particular interests — get in touch with us and come out for a garden tour to see what we do!