Observation 1 Ariella Scott

Hey guys.  So for my observation 1 I decided to post about my roommate’s sweet potato.  She bought some sweet potatoes from Jewel about a month ago and used all but one.  About two weeks ago some vines started growing from the one she had left.  Ever since, it has been on the windowsill in her room getting taller and taller.  She keeps it in a dish of water and as the water evaporates, she adds more.

I suppose I was aware that sweet potatoes grow things on them, but I guess I never really thought about how a sweet potato would grow without seeds.  This is probably pretty ignorant, I know, but suffice to say that in my searches I found out the way to grow a sweet potato is from what is growing off of one to begin with. So basically, one must snap these vines off and plant them into some soil.  Pretty soon, the roots will develop and your sweet potatoes will start growing.

In learning about how to grow sweet potatoes, I also found that it can be a lot better to grow them in pots in certain conditions because of how quickly the roots can invade other territory which doesn't seem like the most common gardening knowledge.  Then again, it is not like I would know.

I also found out that it is pretty common knowledge for people to grow sweet potatoes in jars from a cooking blog.

So I suppose that this observation is less about finding something new, but more about rethinking the old.  As students in a large city, we have little opportunity to grow our own food, but seen from these examples above we could clearly grow sweet potatoes.  All that we would need would be a dry place indoors with some natural sunlight.  Growing them in little pots would save a lot of space and also be pretty cheap and easy.  Something that was discussed in our last class was how we appropriate natural history into our own world and this appears to be a fine way to do so.  So I guess in the case of the sweet potato we do not have to reinvent the wheel, but there are definitely different ways to steer its direction.  This can be a metaphor for many paths to sustainability especially when living in a city like Chicago.