The 2014 Sweet Potato Harvest

Every year in October we harvest sweet potatoes in our garden.  The coolest thing about this is that we never planted sweet potato slips.  Ever.  They come up on their own each and every year and the vines stretch out and totally cover about a 25 foot by 10 foot area.  They are sort of like weeds in that you don't have to plant them, they just come up every year.  The best we can figure is that the sweet potato crop started from a composted sweet potato many years ago - the gift that keeps on giving!

The vines reach out and grow and intermittently extend roots into the ground which become the sweet potato tubers that we love to eat.  The vines are full of moisture and when broken, emit a milky white 'sap' that must be sweet, because the cows gather around the garden fence to eat them up as we throw the vines over the fence. It's like the cows look forward to the day we harvest sweet potatoes each year because they bunch up by the fence and beg.  Truly funny to watch!

Sweet Potato Vines

So I got a couple of buckets and a shovel and hollered at Benjamin and Tricia to come help me unearth the sweet orange treasure that lay just beneath the surface in our garden.  We pulled back a portion of the vines, cut them and through them over the fence to the cows and then dug up the entire area, being very careful to not cut up the sweet potatoes, but gently dig around them.  Benjamin always likes to sort through the dirt and find them.  The sweet potatoes range in size from very small to gargantuan.  The small ones we feed to the cows and listen to them crunch them up with their teeth and gums.  The bigger ones go into a bucket for us!

The first sweet potato of 2014

As we toss the vines over, the girls make quick work of the sweet, moist leaves and vines.

Cows gotta eat, too.

Here is a beautiful sweet potato.  It's always exciting to pull a nice one like this out of the ground. We place them in buckets and marvel as the buckets fill up.

A good one

And here is another good sized sweet potato.  You can see some of the other smaller ones around it and see how big this one is in relation to Benjamin's hand.  This year's crop enjoyed beneficial, timely rains which allowed the vines to run and the ground to stay moist.  The vines shaded out all competing weeds enabling a good crop to grow, but you never really know what you've got until you start digging.

A nice, fat sweet potato!  Sometimes the potatoes get too big and this results in a sweet potato that is a little hard and 'stringy.'  Fortunately, all of them were of good size this year - not too big, but just right.  The little roots you see just over the sweet potato are the roots that the cows love to eat.  Some of those get left in the ground and I'm sure that is what becomes next year's sweet potato crop.

Can't wait to eat this one

We've learned not to wash them once we're done.  We merely hang them in an onion sack in the garage where there is good air flow around them and allow them to cure.  According to an LSU AgCenter pamphlet, sweet potatoes aren't very moist or sweet when they are first dug.  They have to be cured for six to eight weeks to achieve maximum sweetness.  Curing allows the cuts in the tubers to heal and further develops the sugars.

Curing Sweet Potatoes

Once cured, they can be stored for months in a cool, dark place.  We'll store them, but most importantly, we'll eat them - mostly by making sweet potato fries, mashed sweet potatoes, and sweet potato pie during the holidays.

And here is the 'after' photo once all the sweet potatoes have been dug, leaving barren ground that will soon be planted in turnips.  We'll eat a few of the turnips, but they are mostly for the cows to eat on in the winter.

The end of the harvest

I'll add some composted chicken litter to the soil to replenish the nutrients that the sweet potatoes used and then we'll plant a new crop so we always have something growing.