A monster at the bottom of my garden

FOR months, the vine just grew on everything it could grab hold of, including the neighbour’s fence.
Being the first time I have seen a sweet potato plant grow this well, I let it go wherever it wanted, except
the lawn. This sweet potato plant certainly knew what it wanted.
Now I know why. When I dug up the root vegetable, I discovered a monster.
It was a giant weighing in at 2.7kg, which took almost an hour to dig out of my garden at Wentworthville.
I had done all I could to help it along, regularly fertilising it and the other plants in my garden with Seasol, in addition to cow and chicken manure.
This was also topped up by bags of mushroom compost, purchased from a generous farmer in Vineyard.
So after many years of gardening, I struck gold – not literally, as I would have wished – but with the biggest and heaviest vegetable I have grown myself.
I had earlier dug out a few impressive-looking ones in the garden bed next to this one, with one weighing just over 1kg. I moved across to the next bed and saw a rounded mould sticking out, and excited, I started digging around it to prise it out.
Even after several minutes, it wasn’t budging and I used one of the small gardening tools to help me, but still there was more to go. There was another one next to it and I took it out – it was a decent size and I felt happy about the harvest – so far.
I kept on digging, and finally, when it was ready to roll out, I was stunned at the size of it, as it was a tad heavy for my hands.
My wife, Roshan, and I then weighed it using my cousin chef Angelo Roche’s trusty weighing scale, and we all had smiles as big as the sweet potato when it stopped at 2.7kg – and yes, I share my garden harvest with others.
I always loved gardening, even back in Sri Lanka, and never fail to get a thrill when the plants bloom and yield their bounty.