One of my last chores, bringing closure to the season, is to clean out our south-facing windowboxes. They've been blooming and blooming and blooming since May, with Frillytunia petunias (home grown from seed), store-bought bedding 'Tahiti'-mix snapdragons, and 'Marguerite' and 'Blackie' sweet potato vines from mail-ordered plugs. The petunias and snaps have kept on going well after the early October frost that pretty much decked the sweet potato vines, but (even though they probably had at least a few more weeks' life left in them) it was time to move them along. The petunias were clearly suffering from not having been deadheaded since the end of summer, and had become leggier than Twiggy due to my irrational inability to cut them back even once during their six months of vigorous growth. Lesson learned for next year: I hereby vow to get rid of my "Every Bloom Is Sacred" mindset (or, I'll at least try to coax myself into cutting back alternate stems if I find my resolve shaky):
Every bloom is sacred,
Every bloom is great;
If a bloom is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
I had a momentary frisson of confusion when I found a red lump in the potting soil. It was a...potato? What's a potato doing in the window box? Beat. Oh, a sweet potato...from the sweet potato vine (or, rather, the other way around). Sure enough, the window boxes have yielded the unexpected bounty pictured above. In some variation on ginseng root, which (much like the "man" in the moon) often seems to grow in the image of the human body, these tubers seem to look like either seal pups, manatees or water fowl. I don't think I'll be frying these up for supper, since these aren't really potato relatives. The botanical name is Ipomoea batatas...yes, as in morning glory ipomoea. Instead, I'll chop up the tubers and try to start some new plants for indoors until next May...then back out to the window boxes.
Update:
Turns out these would be edible after all...Ipomoea batatas is sweet potato (yes, the kind we eat--it's not just a euphemism). (But not yam, which is Dioscorea species. A li'l bit of trivia: "yams" sold in supermarkets are actually sweet potatoes, and, if they're following US Department of Agriculture regulations, you'll find that the labels for "yams" will include the words "sweet potato".)
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