Sweet potatoes!

From the time we moved here and I discovered the huge garden that we had, I wanted to grow sweet potatoes. The problem was that I needed vine cuttings to plant and I didn’t have any. When I talked to someone at a seed store about what to grow on a hill, he said “we have this cover crop here in Uganda that we call sweet potatoes” and I was a bit confused what he meant by saying it was a cover crop. But then when my third year students came to visit our house, they looked at the weeds growing in our garden and told me that they were sweet potatoes! It turns out that sweet potatoes are sort of weeds here unless you build heaps of soil and plant the vines in there. Then they grow the sweet potatoes – otherwise they’re just the leaves and vines. Anyway, I did plant them and we’re hoping to get some, even though the dry season starts soon. At the very least, I’ll know for planting during next rainy season.

When we were in Lira with James, we ate a lot of really tasty sweet potatoes. Anthony and I brought a bunch home with us too. But I got a lesson on growing sweet potatoes there too. Joseph, Milton, and James were asking me about whether I had planted them after their class’ visit and then they asked me how high I made my heaps. Well, it turns out I made them about a foot taller than I needed to, so they got a good laugh out of that and then brought me out to the field to show me how high they should really be.
So here are some of the meals we were served in Lira. First, dinner of greens, millet bread, chicken, sweet potatoes, and a sauce made from peas.


Then, breakfast: cabbage, sweet potatoes, eggs, and sesame (they call it sim-sim) paste (sort of like peanut butter, only with sesame instead of peanuts).


Finally, lunch: matooke, rice, chapatti, chicken, millet bread, tea, and (not in the picture) sweet potatoes!