Indeed, patience is a virtue. One afternoon, my mother went inside the room smiling while holding something in her hands. She walked closer and showed me these two pieces of sweet potatoes.
It was a year and two months since we began planting in our backyard garden and among the first that we planted were sweet potato leaves which we usually add to the dish Sinigang or Milk Fish in Sour Soup. We cleaned and cut bottles of water and hang it around drift woods.
The sweet potato leaves grow fast and we were able to plant a lot of it. However, a some months ago, we were not able to take care of the garden as much as we did before and the sweet potato leaves continued to grow and eventually crawled making its way to the garden bed where the bok choys and dragon fruits are planted. We had too much sweet potato leaves and they were already being a nuisance to other plants and so early this year, my mother began cutting off excess stem of the sweet potato leaves each day until she was able to completely trim the plants.
And last week, she saw that there were some sweet potato plants growing on the garden bed. She pulled the plants and was greeted with a sweet potato. She dug on the side and found another. It was the white kind of sweet potato and she told me the inside of it is orange in color. She said she'll cook these for breakfast but then I found out she added it to the bread pudding. Lol. I'll write about it next time when I got the recipe from her.
I am just so happy to know that sweet potatoes can grow on the garden bed. Our garden bed does not have the best soil and we could hardly grow bok choys on it that's why it was a surprise for us. Maybe I could suggest that we plant stems of sweet potatoes directly on that soil. I remember I asked my mother if there are sweet potatoes that have grown into the water bottles. She said she doesn't know but there's a possibility that a sweet potato have grown inside too.
Sweet potato tastes good when sliced thin and fried! If we will have more sweet potatoes, I would experiment other recipes. I suddenly missed eating the fried sweet potatoes we used to buy during college. :)