Patate
Sweet potato
Ipomoea batatas
The versatile sweet potato is a staple crop throughout Haiti; just as its range extends latitudinally from the equator northward well into the temperate zone in the United States, Japan, and Korea, so it is grown from the hot Caribbean shore up to a chill 2,100 meters (7,000 feet). In the choice of a site for the sweet potato patch, the native gives it priority over maize and sorghum; still it is common to see plots of sweet potatoes on very steep hillsides.
As has been mentioned, sweet potatoes are interplanted with other crops - maize, red beans, manioc - but it is not in the least rare for them to be planted alone, albeit in diminutive fields of a quarter-acre or less. Vines for plating are obtained from another field that is being harvested. Sometimes a neighbor's potatoes are purchased in the field, vines, tubers and all, in the event a farmer has no vines available on his own lands and no neighbor is kind enough to give him some. A superstition that the gift of seed or vines condemns both donor and recipient to a poor crop, inhibits charity within the community. In the Grand-Anse and on the Cayes Plain, the major planting season for sweet potatoes is from November through Februrary. However, in these districts, and in other parts of the country as well, planting and harvesting of sweet potatoes go on throughout the year, save in ares with severe dry seasons where planting is done at the beginning of the vernal and autumnal rains.
In the mountains near Furcy, sections of vine with three or four nodes are partially buried at intervals of 25 cm (10 inches) in troughs 10 cm (4 in.) deep, 15 cm (6 in.) wide and 60 cm (24 in.) long; the troughs are parallel to the contours and are spaced 50 cm (20 in.) apart. men make the troughs with hoes, or in rocky soil with picks, and men or women set the vines on either the upper or lower edge of the trough. On the plains, the vines are planted on ridges which are as high as 45 cm (18 in.) in areas such Torbeck with a high water table. The ridges may be wither long or discontinuous and short; the same is true of the contour troughs in the mountains.
Several prohibitions are enjoined on the native who wishes a good sweet potato crop; he is not to greet a neighbor who is planting; he is to refrain from sexual intercourse during the planting season; he is to allow no woman in menstruation to plant or to walk through the field when the vines are in blossom.
They are weeded once or twice with machetes.
Rust and snails attack the leaves of the sweet potatoes, while rats, mice, black rot (Sphacronima fimbriatum), and the ant-shaped sweet potato beetle (Cycias formicarious) ravage the roots. Digging the tubers as soon as they are ripe and crop rotation lessen the damage from the beetle. The snails are especially numerous in the mountains where they serve as a severe nuisance on beans as well as sweet potatoes. To control them, planks are laid down under which the snails assemble so that they are easy to kill.
16 varieties of sweet potatoes were observed at Cayes, Jérémie, and Furcy. Probably, there are many more in Haiti. Locals at Furcy and Savane Zombi stated that there are different varieties for the terre froide of the mountains and the terre chaude of the lowlands. Sweet potatoes from humid Dame-Marie did not yield in experiment station plots at semi-arid Damiens. There is a varietal range from three to six months in length of growing season. Leaf outlines vary from entire to intricately dissected; roots are both spheroidal and elongated and their external coloration may be white, yellow, red or violet, while the flesh is white or yellow and of differing degrees of sweetness. On the whole, the Haitian sweet potatoes are rather starchy, not nearly as sweet as those produced in the United States. Two of the varieties rasied at Cayes, Ti Rose and Jiguani, are recent introductions from Cuba. One three-month red variety, Elvelise, raised at Jérémie is supposed to make boys virile. In the Pine Forest, there is a peculiar variety with white turnip-shaped roots, which were observed elsewhere in Haiti, but which is well distributed in the Dominican Republic and which was also spotted at a market in Saigon, Vietnam.
Although sweet potatoes are best when they are allowed to mature, the needy farmer may dig some sooner, locating the large ones by bumps in the earth. Hoes and crowbars are used for the harvest.
Culinary treatment includes roasting, boiling, the preparation of casseroles with mashed boiled potato, sugar and spice, and pudding with mashed boiled potato, milk and sugar. Candy is made by grating the raw potato and cooking it with sugar, cinnamon, star anise, nutmeg, milk and fat, then placing it on a greased plate, leaving it to cool, and cutting it into squares. A similar sweet potato candy is popular in Mexico. In contrast with the Orient, where the sweet potato is disdained as a food for those too poor to buy rice, is quite respectable in Haiti. The tables of hotels and pensions are graced almost daily with boiled sweet potatoes, while such native dishes as breadfruit, corn meal mush and boiled sorghum rarely, if ever, appear on them.
Potato vines not needed for planting are fed to the livestock. New growth is cut to serve as a potherb.
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