Shhh!!! Don't Tell Dad!

First the back story.  The Girl Far From Home loves sweet potatoes.  She loves them a lot.  So she got the brilliant idea that she wanted to plant some of the things she likes most.  She planted some mint to make tea with (but it didn't do so well), a tomato plant in a hanging pot the assistant principal at school made (got lots of tomatoes off that one) and a sweet potato.  Well, that sweet potato grew lots and lots of vines.  Those vines went everywhere and grew like crazy - in spite of the drought.  Here you see the pot (the orangish one in the middle) and the vines trailing out - you can only see the vines that came out and trailed down the yard side of the pot, there are just as many going out the back and across the patio and down the path.

This is where you can see the vines that trailed across the yard to the gardens on the other side.  As you can see from these pictures, the drought has done very bad things to the yard.  So Steve decided that since it was going to rain last weekend, he'd try to plant some grass seed and see if it would grow for a while.  He had to buy the decorative hay bales in the Home Depot because they weren't carrying real ones.  (Pricey!!!)

Back to our story.  So after Girl Far From Home planted the potato in the pot and it started trailing, she pulled up a few of the vines and tossed them in the recycle bin.  She discovered that these vines put out roots at each leaf joint and some of the roots were pretty firmly embedded in the dirt they were crossing.  So she planted one of the branches she pulled up on the side of the hill behind the driveway and it's growing quite well.  Then she and her friend Eric decided to cut some of the vines from the mother plant and see if they would grow and make potatoes in the yard.  They grew.  They wilted a little the first couple of days because we had no rain, but I watered them every time I watered the plants in pots and they grew.

Today, I went out to water the grass-to-be-well-maybe for Steve so that it would grow.  The yard has a lot of moss growing in it that I'm sure wasn't there before the rain.  It has a lot of new little plants but I'm afraid that most of them look more like weed seedlings than grass seedlings . . . but time will tell.  So while I was watering the grass, I gave the pots a little water too.  I was pulling a dead leaf off one of the taros and saw something funny colored on the ground.  Took a closer look and this is what I saw:

Need a closer view of that?  Ok, here ya go:

Yepper!  Thems the tops of some little orange sweet potatoes!!!  Looks like three of them there . . . but wait - that's not all a little farther over there was this . . . .

and a little farther over still there was this . . . .

So I decided to look in the pot where we are supposed to be growing the sweet potatoes and this is what I saw:

Don't know how many more there are in the pot itself, but it looks like there is a bumper crop in the yard.  That's going to make Dad happy, especially if his grass grows.  If it doesn't then it's no big deal to dig up the potatoes.  I wonder if the hillside strangler has made any potatoes?