so yesterday i started pulling up sweet potato plants. when we bought this house, there basically no garden, just sand. talking to other neighbors, this is actually quite unusual. people who build here on their own are required to also put in a garden, plants or whatever. only one other family who bought a house in our group actually bought top-soil and sod and made a garden (paid for by someone's parents, i understand), the rest of us have put a tree there, a bush there (and in our case, now, a row of runty trees) but for the most part those gardens are pretty sandy. oh, except for our next door neighbors who had most of the garden bulldozed out and is now an extra-big driveway.

instead of buying dirt (ha!) yoshi wants to try to compost it in. i think we can do it, and part of it is planting some things, letting them grow and then pulling them up and composting them. early in the summer he planted sweet potatoes, okra, watermelon and an eggplant (yes, just one. *sigh*) i put in some goya and tomatoes, but the best things that grew were the watermelon vines and tomato plants that came out of the kitchen compost. the sweet potatoes have done wonderfully, a beautiful sea of green in our garden. and judging by the sound, the crickets love them, too. but it's starting to get cold, and all that green made us think we have LOADS of potatoes, but...

i spent maybe two hours yesterday pulling up and cutting sweet potato plants (which actually aren't potatoes, but are related to morning glories) and got...nothing. seriously, there wasn't a tuber to be had! i pulled, i cut, i sweated and got nothing out of the ground. i think that's because below the two or three inches of sand, there's hard clay. the plants spread out because there was no way down!

anyway, my back and legs are killing me! OUCH! i worked so hard but have nothing to show for it! *sob*