Gorgeous picture there!
The sweet potato vines really are on a mission to cover the garden if allowed. I think the vines are gorgeous.
Did you spray your vines with anything? I know some people will mist their vines and plants with large foliage with something organic to keep the leaves happy and prophylactically manage bugs and disease. I'm not sure what I'd mist on my leaves and hope I'll figure out something when a problem presents itself.
Based on what others have said, I haven't decided whether or not to use sand. I will definitely use straw, potting mix and compost from my compost pin. I bought a couple bags of the Miracle Gro potting mix, which I'm not at all happy with. Back in Denver, I had a source for relatively inexpensive organic potting mix in 2 cubic feet bags. This MG stuff has a lot of big wood chunks. Even manure I buy locally, from box stores has a lot of wood compared to what I used to get. I'm worried about the wood scraping or gouging the sweet potatoes. We added a lot of manure to the garden in January, as soon as there was a warm day to do so. I wanted to avoid using regular garden soil from the garden because of all the rocks we have that take forever to sift. I heard regular garden soil is not good for containers to drain properly. The bags of regular inexpensive garden soil also seemed to have a lot of big wood chunks.
Next year, I'll have to find a different source for manure and organic potting mix. I can find small bags of organic potting mix, but it is too expensive for using in large containers. I used to recycle all my spent potting mix in my compost pile in the spring to give all my containers fresh potting mix. I know a lot of home gardeners use MG, but I avoided it all these years because organic options were plentiful and the quality I trust.
