Harvesting Sweet Potato Greens & Transitioning Crops

Village Farm Team,

Though our sweet potatoes are not quite ready for harvest, their abundant greens growing above the soil are ripe for the picking, so to speak. Sweet potato greens are not only edible, they have an incredibly delicious, spinach-like flavor with a subtle hint of sweetness. They make for a great source of leafy greens during the summer months when it’s too hot for crops like lettuces, kale, chard, or traditional spinach to grow. Sweet potato greens can be cooked in the same manner as spinach. We’ll be harvesting the greens this week so make sure to look for them at the veggie wagon this Saturday!

We’ve reached a transition period with a lot of our crops. While our okra and eggplant thrive and continue to steadily grow, the remaining zucchini and pepper plants were cleared out along with several rows of our tomatoes. We planted another succession of zucchini and summer squashes with an emphasis on the varieties that either did well with the first round or are more heat-tolerant. We also planted another succession of butternut squash and will soon be planting pumpkins. As more crops are cleared, we’ll be planting additional successions of cucumbers, peppers, and eventually a fall crop of tomatoes.

The melon harvesting continued this week with Sugar Cube and Athena maturing at a faster rate than the Milan variety. Sugar Cube and Athena both resemble what we think of as a “Cantaloupe”: round fruits with a beige rind that has a reticulated appearance and orange aromatic flesh. Though they look similar in appearance, Athena produces larger fruits that have longitudinal indentations on the rind. Sugar Cubes (pictured below) are considered a “personal-size” melon thus they are smaller and lack the longitudinal indentations on the rind. Just as the name implies, Sugar Cubes have intensely sweet flesh! The hollowed out seed cavity makes the perfect vessel for a scoop of yogurt, ice cream, or sorbet.