Potatoes and peanuts...

I planted some sweet potato slips and raw peanuts (from Publix) along the edges of my main bed, in some sunny spots where the last bit of weedy grass lived in my back yard. Not a big space, a narrow slice about ten feet long and five feet wide. I used the mower or weed whacker to keep them in line all summer. They made a nice enough ground cover--aside from the mowing, no maintenance (no fertilizer, no water). The peanuts were very well behaved and dense enough to keep most weeds out. The sweet potatoes had good days and bad.

Anyway, I dug them up today. I expected more sweet potatoes, but suspect my harvest was reduced because I never tilled or spaded the area. The sand was surprisingly compacted when I dug the bed. What's more, I didn't improve the soil at all. When I've grown sweet potatoes in the past, they were in fairly rich beds.

The total yield for peanuts was only a couple cups, but that's the fruit of four or five plants, from a handful of peanuts that I seeded back in May or June. So, return on investment is pretty high.

I have a couple more beds of sweet potatoes scattered about them corners and edges of the yard. I'll leave them another month or so, seeing as how many of the potatoes I dug were meager.