Growing Our Own: Enough Calories for a Year: New Farmer brings some Sweet Potato Slips

The new farmer has arrived in town and will be homesteading with us for a few weeks. The garden has been very productive over the last few days and I really need to post almost every day to keep up with what we are harvesting.
However, one of the new things in the ground is sweet potato slips. Slips is how you grow sweet potatoes. Last year I bought mine on-line and they come as pretty sorry looking stems with wilted leaves. You stick the slip in the ground and away they go. Last year with 6 hills I had nearly 75 pounds by the fall. This year I tried to grow my own slips and although I have two slips I wanted more, so I went ahead and ordered some online. The new farmer has a friend back in Florida and he has grown his own slips for many years and when he heard about my plight sent 45! slips up to me. Well that is way too many for my yard, so I will have some to give away plus the ones coming in the mail. The ones from Florida look very healthy and hearty. I will put a couple of store bought ones in for comparisons.

One of the the things great about growing your own food is that you can have old stand by like sweet potato and when you go outside to the car can pick up a great strawberry or a few sugar snaps to snack on. You can also try something new; like fava beans. I planted my seed in winter and the plants are beautiful with probably 50 blooms per plants but for some reason they are not setting fruit very well and the number of pods that I am getting is only 1 or 2 per plant. I don't know what is supposed to pollinate the flowers but they did not visit my pretty plants.

The last of the broccoli raab was harvested and the plants pulled up and sent to the compost.
Overall in the last 4 days 2.538 kilograms of produce and about 1 Kg of that was strawberries. Also the first yellow squash and as mentioned earlier the first fava beans.