Crop Failure

It's really easy and fun to post pictures and talk about the success of a great harvest. It's not as easy or enjoyable to talk about when things just don't go right, but that's life.  Some games you win.  Some games you lose.  Some games are gonna get rained out.  You keep going, learning from your mistakes and moving forward.

"Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense." - Sir Winston Churchill

Image Credit

Today we'll discuss the 2013 Sweet Potato harvest.  The 2012 harvest was record breaking for us.  We cured several onion sacks full of sweet potatoes and ate on them for months.  The anticipation for another bumper crop was there, but the crop didn't materialize.  Let's back up a bit.  We never plant our sweet potatoes.  They just come up on their own every year during the summer and grow and grow until their vines encompass big swaths of the garden.  We're guessing that years ago we composted a sweet potato that grew and it re-grows every year and blesses us.  To be honest, we don't really know how to grow them. They just 'grow themselves.'  The sweet potato harvest is always in the latter part of October or early November.

This year we had a very dry summer.  Since I work a full time job, I don't have a lot of time to irrigate the crops.  As a result, the dry weather made the ground hard and dry and the vines didn't really start growing until the latter part of the summer.  I knew this was going to diminish the yield - I just didn't know how much. That's the thing about sweet potatoes - you don't know what you've got until you start digging. That's sort of the way our lives are, right?  Sometimes our lives' outward signs portray good things, but it's not until you take out the spade and start digging around beneath the surface, that you can determine if the outward appearance produced good things underneath or if the outward signs were nothing but a show.  The vines looked okay, but it is time to start digging to find out what lay in store for us.  So Benjamin and I got a shovel and started digging. This is a true 'shovel ready' job, but no stimulus funds were received for our toils!

Sweet Potato Vines (The Before pic)

We normally cut a little section, cutting the vines and throwing them over to the cows to eat.  The cows absolutely LOVE sweet potato vines.  I'm convinced they look forward to this every year.  They line up alongside the fence and eat!  

Yum Yum!

Maggie and Rosie fighting over a vine

Daisy administering a head butt to Maggie

After the vines are out of the way, we take the shovel and turn the ground over, revealing (hopefully) some delicious Beauregard sweet potatoes.  We take all the sweet potatoes that are too small to eat and feed them to the cows.  They crunch, crunch crunch on them.  They can never get enough of 'em.  Long after the last vine is cut and sweet potato is dug, they'll beg at the garden fence with long, sad faces.

Shovel Ready Job?

When the dust settled, this was it.  One fourth of a milk crate of medium to small sized sweet 'taters.  We had long, sad faces like the cows.  Oh well, we'll cure and eat what we have in the crate, but the length of time it'll take to eat them will be measured in mere days instead of months like last year's crop.

The sweet potato harvest of 2013.  (I yam what I yam!)

Our field of dreams had turned into a nightmare.

The After Pic

So here are the lessons learned from the 2012 Sweet Potato Crop:

1. Plentiful vines don't always equate to a plentiful crop (for humans, that is, - the cows made out fine),
2. Look into setting up some sort of inexpensive irrigation next year,
3. Incorporate even more organic matter into the soil to preserve moisture and fertility and lessen ground compaction.

Fortunately, Garber Farms, a world class producer of sweet potatoes is just a stone's throw away and once our pathetic little inventory of sweet potatoes is gone, we can get our fix from a local supplier.  Besides, what's Thanksgiving without candied yams?