Be Practical! Fight inflation at home: Grow sweet potato (kamote) tops by improvised hydroponics. (Part 2)

     A Kitchen Garden

Practical Hydroponics

Dr Abe V Rotor

Three-week old kamote tops kitchen garden

You can grow kamote or sweet potato tops* in the kitchen. It also serves as a greenery of sort on the window sill.

Fill to three-fourth a convenient glass jar with tap water. Place a healthy tuber on the mouth of the jar. To keep it steady, stick three pieces of toothpick like a tripod. Add water daily as roots develop. Be sure to replace water weekly to prevent mosquitoes from breeding in the jar.

In a week's time or two you can start harvesting. At first allow the tops to extend. Just clip the leaves you need in your cooking. Rotate the position of the tuber towards the source of light, so that you will have more shoots, and greener and bigger leaves.

Now you have a dish garden for a whole month or longer. You can grow fresh onion leaves with this technique. Try it on garlic.

You see, this is simple hydroponics - soil-less gardening. It is introduction to the science of hydroponics and aeroponics. For school children, why don't you try this as your project?

Read more about hydroponics and aeroponics. Happy gardening! 

(Model: Miss Gelyn S Gabao, 19 Filipina)

Kamote (Ipomea batatas) tops contain more minerals and vitamins than any other vegetables, or its equivalent weight in meat and poultry. It is a glow food that enhances natural beauty and health, and gives that gait, poise and stride that many beauties display. It is the secret to acquiring and maintaining natural immunity and high resistance against diseases and other ailments. It contains substances that sharpen the brain and quicken responses to situations and the environment. 

It is a vegetable all year round. In summer kamote is grown in the fields and gardens for its enlarged roots or tubers which are rich in carbohydrates (go food) and rich in protein (grow food). In the habagat, it grows wild and luxuriant on hilltops, on levees and dikes, on the uplands, covering wide areas, keeping weeds down and protecting the soil from erosion. 

Kamote tops make an excellent dish with mungo and pork, bulanglang with shrimp or fish, and mushroom, or cooked in other recipes, or served as salad, blanched with red, ripe tomatoes and sliced onions, with a dash of salt, or a dip of fish sauce - bagoong or patis. Or cooked in tinola in place of pepper leaves, and green papaya. Why not blanch the tops on rice in its final stage of cooking? Add bagoong squeezed with calamansi or lemon. 

Kamote tops, maligned for being a poor man's food, rise to the apex of the food pyramid, top the list health programs, and doctors' prescription. Kamote tops occupies the rank of malunggay, alugbati, talinum, and spinach, relegating lettuce and other crucifers - cabbage and cauliflower and pechay - to the backseat.

Kamote tops are safe to health and the environment because they don't carry residues of pesticides applied on the field on many crops, and also those of toxic metals like lead, mercury and cadmium. Damaged parts are simply discarded, harvesting only the succulent and healthy leaves for further safety and better presentation.

Kamote tops come in green and purple, characteristic of the plant varieties, but in both cases, the same nutritive values are derived, with some advantage from the purple variety which contains xanthophyll in addition to chlorophyl. Both are recommended for anemic persons for their high iron content, and to those suffering from poor bone development, poor eyesight, and poor metabolism.

Kamote tops are used as planting materials, a case of cloning in the plant world, each stem becoming a new plant rejuvenated and true to type genetically - and younger than the parent source.  The new plant is capable of carrying all processes that constitute the plant's cycle.  It is a phenomenon known in variable observations in the living world, which heretofore remains unsolved by science.

Beauties come naturally with good food, simple and active lifestyle, in the rural areas where sunshine, clean air and surrounding, make a perfect combination from which spring the true beauty of man and woman, as compared to the makeup beauty from cosmetics, expensive salons, and by the so-called wonders of science and technology like liposuction and surgery. Why can't we simply eat kamote tops more often? ~