Laura asks about our cucumber/watermelon/sweet potato ground cover succession in the Grocery Row Gardens:

“I had not thought about using cucumbers, watermelons, and sweet potatoes in succession over the course of the growing season. That’s genius. Just to be sure I understand: You sow the cucumbers first, and then the melons a couple weeks later, right? How long do you wait after sowing the melons to set out the sweet potato slips?”

Good question.

How the Cucumber/Watermelon/Sweet Potato Ground Cover Works

We usually plant them these three crops around the same time, sometimes starting with the cucumbers. The cucumbers run really fast, the watermelons are slower, and the sweet potatoes also tolerate being overgrown by the other two and will happily await their turn to dominate. The determining factor in this successionary ground cover is the relative lifespans of the three crops.

Cucumbers start producing cukes at about 55-65 days, and give a harvest for a few weeks before declining.

Our watermelons really start cooking around 90-100 days and keep going for a couple months before declining.

Sweet potatoes run all season long and into the fall, when they are harvested at about 6-7 months of age, after the cucumbers and watermelons are long gone.

Each of these crops goes in during the month of April, but the times of dominance peak and then recede in successive waves, making this work quite well.

They do run over each other some, but as the watermelons swell into their prime in June, the cucumbers are waning – and as the watermelons peter out in early August, the sweet potatoes are really kicking up their game in the heat and rain of summer.

Zero Shade for Sweet Potatoes?

Justin asks:

“Are you leaving certain areas in your grocery rows free of trees/shrubs to grow your root crops like the sweet potatoes?”

No – we plant them right around the bases of the trees and shrubs. Remember, the trees are 12′ apart, and the shrubs are at the 6′ mark between each tree. This leaves plenty of space. Though sweet potatoes are said to like “full sun,” the bit of shade the trees cast doesn’t seem to bother them at all. Alabama full sun is really brutal. We also prune our trees to let in the light and remove branches that are in the way of our gardening, so they aren’t blocking out a lot of sun.

We’ve planted sweet potatoes right into a maturing food forest with more shade and they still did well.

Not bad!

Today we planted more sweet potatoes, and I’ll be posting a video on that soon. Stay tuned.