Victory Is Sweet

In April of this year before leaving for the US, we planted a considerable amount of sweet potato vines on an underutilized area of the property in an effort to @addmoregreen to our diets (vegetarians always like more options).  For the two months before leaving Australia, I watered the area religiously everyday, making sure that the area remained well quenched (although not too wet because sweet potatoes do not like waterlogged soil).  With vines that were only a few months old I was afraid for their future but as you can see below, mission accomplished!  Now that we've returned home we have started to harvest the crop and have only just scratched the surface; this pile of sweet potatoes is about 5% of what remains uncovered.

Before our existence on Kookaburra Hill, this area was a large banana plantation that was devastated by Bunchy Top and wiped out the entire farm.  Since that time, molasses grass has taken over most of the area where bananas used to thrive.  However, thanks to some hard work and determination we have cleared out a 150 sq. metre plot to begin what we hope to be a great permaculture garden some day.  The vines lay on a hill that is entirely north facing and receive sunlight from sunrise to sunset.  Below is the current state of the area with sweet potato vines going wild!

This was my first time ever cultivating and harvesting sweet potatoes and I'm extremely happy for how successfully it went.  Now that we have a great groundcover established our next step to advance the area will be to plant small fruit bushes that will continue providing us with delicious foods!  My next immediate challenge is to figure out what to do with all of these sweet potatoes, two of us can only eat so much starch.  Any ideas of great ways to distribute massive amounts of sweet potatoes would be greatly appreciated in the comments section.