‘God grew the rest’

People around the community have taken notice of a photo posted to the newspaper’s Facebook page of a giant sweet potato grown near Greenfield. Some think it may be a state record.

At the prompting of his son, Bill Piper notified Adair County ISU Extension and Outreach of a sweet potato of unusually large size he harvested from his garden recently.

Extension staff arranged for the potato to be weighed on a scale at Greenfield Fareway Meat and Grocery, and it weighed 12.77 pounds. While the world record sweet potato, grown in Switzerland, weighed more than 95 pounds, a sweet potato is generally considered large when it weighs more than 12 ounces.

“All we did was provide some soil, compost, water and a sweet potato slip, and God grew the rest,” Bill said. “When they started looking dry I watered them. That’s the only special attention I gave them.”

Bill and his wife Kathi started gardening several years ago, but their endeavor grew considerably after he retired from the Iowa DOT and she retired from a home graphic design business. They hold some of the harvest for themselves and share the rest with their church family and the wider community.

The sweet potatoes are easy to grow, Bill said.

“Mostly we make fries from them. Kathi has a cheesy potatoes recipe, and a few years ago we used half sweet potatoes and half regular potatoes,” Bill said.

This is the second year in a row that the Pipers have grown the majority of their garden in homemade raised beds, but they’ve had a few raised beds for about a decade. The 13 raised beds they now have allow them to be able to tip the plastic tubes at harvest rather than digging. They grow peas, beans, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, watermelon and more in this way.

“Last year we had two watermelon that were 43, 44 pounds. That was the first time we had grown those raised,” Bill said. “We had a tube, just like the sweet potatoes, and planted seeds in them for watermelon. It grew two of them that size and three or four smaller ones, all from that 18-inch diameter tube.”

In addition to their gardening, Kathi enjoys canning and freeze-drying.

The Pipers’ sweet potato harvest this year was large enough that they delivered five 5-gallon buckets worth of sweet potatoes to friends around the community.

While any record awarded for sweet potatoes in Iowa is merely unofficial, the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship does try to keep a pulse on large fruits and vegetables grown in Iowa.

IDALS State Horticulturalist Paul Ovrom said, “it must be the year for the sweet potato.”