Sweet Potato Nurturing!

Hello! It’s Esteban again, back to share more with you about what Campus Farm has been up to this past Spring semester! As I mentioned before, the Religion and Ecology class was required to complete 10 hours of farm work per student. After Alex and I set up a sign-up sheet for times that we would be at the farm, we let them sign up and the work began!

Bonnie was an irreplaceable resource for us this semester. On Monday mornings, she would come to the farm, and show me and some students basic gardening tasks. She also have a semester-long project that involved a sweet potato! She had several sweet potato seedlings from the previous year. She gave one to each student. We were instructed to use toothpicks to suspend the potato at the top of the jar filled with water. Then, it would grow roots and sprouts. After a while, these sprouts could be divided and suspended in water themselves, so they could grow their own roots. Then they could be planted to grow into many more sweet potatoes in the fall!

It was a fun and cool project that got each student involved. The students felt like they were personally part of the process of planting and growing food, which linked well to a book called Good Food that they were reading in class. Throughout the semester, they would mention to me about how excited they were about their sweet potato’s roots growing, or that they were sad that their potato wasn’t doing well. Here’s one student’s experience with sweet potato rearing:

“The most connection I felt between myself and food, though, was through the rearing of a sweet potato sapling. I was charged with the task of caring for it throughout the entirety of the semester until it grew stems that could themselves be planted in order to spawn even more potatoes. I have put much care into watering and nurturing my sweet potato, and have grown quite attached. I experienced much excitement at watching it grow, not for the purpose of wanting to eat the results, but simply because I was happy it was thriving. I am glad that I had this opportunity to connect with a plant.”

Bonnie continued to teach us the steps in this potato project, which I tried to pass on to the students when Bonnie wasn’t around in the afternoon sessions. As a master gardener, she’s been incredibly helpful about what needs to be done around the farm. We cannot thank her enough for her generous work for the Campus Farm this semester. I’ll post a video below of her teaching one step of the sweet-potato-growing process. Bye for now!