sweet potatoes

The new RS Farm turns four

January means a new year, and it also marks the beginning of the fourth year of production on the redesigned Rural Studio Farm.

Two students start seeds in 72-cell seedling trays

With each successive year, we refine our techniques and continue to add more to the farm. In 2021, we raised our total production from 5,701 pounds to 6,352 pounds. But we didn’t just produce more, we produced smarter by growing more of what we needed and thereby reduced waste.

We also added several crops to our rotation, most notably sweet corn and sweet potatoes—both of which made it to our top ten list for the year.

Top ten crop list for 2021 (pounds)

  1. summer squash and zucchini           654.1
  2. Asian and Italian eggplant                 519.2
  3. tomatoes and cherry tomatoes         492.9
  4. lettuces                                             485.6
  5. kale                                                   415
  6. mustard greens                                 403.9
  7. sweet potatoes                                 374.8
  8. turnips                                               369.5
  9. sweet corn                                        264.2
  10. carrots                                              257.3

In 2021, we also expanded our growing space by adding new permanent raised beds in an area of campus that was previously difficult to manage.

Finally, we planted numerous fruit trees and berry bushes: blueberries, kiwiberries, Asian pears, crabapples, figs, elderberries, and mayhaw.

Looking ahead to this year, we want to further diversify the crops that we grow to increase resilience and biodiversity on the farm. We also want to continue to add more long-term crops—like fruit trees—which will have big payoffs in the future. Speaking of which, this will be the first year when we can begin to harvest asparagus, so stay tuned!

Sweet potato harvest

Students harvested the first sweet potato crop since the Rural Studio’s farm reboot in 2019.

But unlike previous sweet potato crops, these were grown in the greenhouse. The Farm’s passive solar greenhouse gets so hot and still during the long Alabama summers that it can be difficult to grow many crops in the peak of summer, and sweet potatoes take up so much space that they are difficult to grow in our small, intensively managed outdoor cultivated areas. Growing the potatoes this way solved both difficulties at once!

Sweet potatoes are most often grown from slips, which are small shoots cut from mature sweet potato tubers and rooted. The farm team planted 200 sweet potato slips into the raised beds in the greenhouse on June 7.

In only a matter of weeks the vines from the growing slips swallowed up the greenhouse: filling the aisles, climbing the barrel wall, and bursting through the windows. It was a beautiful transformation of the space that required almost no maintenance all summer long.

After four months, students dug up the new tubers and cleared out all of the vines.

Once dug up, the tubers then needed to be placed in a warm, humid environment in which to cure for about two weeks. During the curing process, the sweet potatoes’ skin thickens somewhat, any wounds or nicks heal over, and the sweet flavor of the flesh concentrates. Not only does this improve the flavor, but it significantly lengthens their storage potential, so students and staff can enjoy sweet potatoes all throughout the winter.

Dog Days of Summer

The long, hot, busy summer on the Rural Studio Farm is finally starting to wind down toward autumn.

A student uses an oscillating hoe to weed between rows of pinkeye purple hull peas

With several of our recent graduates once again spending their summers here in Hale County, we have been experimenting with the timing and varieties for multiple crop cycles of summer favorites: tomatoes, squash, eggplant, sweet corn, and cherry tomatoes. The Sun Gold cherry tomatoes have been the biggest hit of the summer!

We’ve been able to provide fresh produce for those students working over the summer (with extra to be preserved for the future) and still have some fresh for the students whose semester has just begun. We have also harvested mountains of pinkeye purple hull peas, garlic, onions, zucchini, peppers, melons, butternut squash, and many leafy brassicas.

This summer we added sweet corn and sweet potatoes to the crop rotation (more on these in future posts). The fresh sweet corn was a big success with two crops of fresh juicy corn. The sweet potatoes have also proven to be a great choice because we have been growing them in the greenhouse where few other crops are able to thrive during the long hot summers. They have performed so well that there is no longer any room to walk!

A long shot of the sea of sweet potato vines that has blanketed the inside of the greenhouse in palmate leaves