High Altitude Nature and Gardens – Cornmeal in the garden; sweet potato leaf greens

By Janet Sellers

With all the rain this summer, we had an abundance of toadstools—toxic fungi—popping up throughout our gardens, green spaces, and grasses. I wondered what to do about it besides bagging them up with gloved hands and pitching them in the trash. They often popped up in just hours.

One remedy I found is scattering cornmeal. Cornmeal supports beneficial fungi that outcompete the toadstools but don’t harm the garden and the desired plants. It also helps the garden fight root rot and powdery mildew, and is a mild, slow-release food source for beneficial microbes and beneficial fungi. (A tablespoon of baking soda in a gallon of water helps cure powdery mildew in soil and on the leaves, too.)

Cornmeal, as reported on the Martha Stewart website, also attracts beneficial insects such as ladybugs, lacewings, and ground beetles that feed on aphids, mites, and other pests, according to garden expert Megan Edge. Cornmeal helps minimize or delete harmful fungi and develop healthy compost and soil.

Four benefits that cornmeal offers that were noted were as a natural fungicide, a mild fertilizer, a gentle deterrent against common garden pests, and elimination of compost odors. Caveat: Creating healthy soil, good drainage, and cultural practice is the ideal. Many informal reports say to use only a light sprinkle of cornmeal for best results.

Sweet potato greens

Making a simple garlic stir-fry is a quick and popular way to prepare sweet potato leaves, but they can also be used in soups and stews. The leaves have a neutral flavor similar to spinach.

Sweet potatoes can be grown indoors over the winter in pots. The leaves are tasty, often cooked like spinach or eaten raw in salads. We can grow sweet potatoes outside, eat the leaves all season, then harvest the tubers at the end of the season. Sweet potatoes are a tropical plant, so warm indoor growing will give us good leaves and possibly some tubers, but outdoor growing offers the most tubers per plant and the best size.

One sweet potato can offer 50 to 100 slips, and up to 100 pounds of sweet potatoes from that one tuber and all its slips when grown outdoors. They make a very pretty indoor or outdoor vine, and the flowers resemble morning glories. They’re in the same family.

Janet Sellers is an avid “lazy gardener” researching permaculture for high altitude forest and landscape living, and how these shape our lives. Contact her at JanetSellers@ocn.me.

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