A Bumper Crop of Sweet Potatoes!

Every year it seems when I post about the harvest of sweet potatoes, we say the same thing, but here goes:

Sweet potatoes are a great crop for several reasons - first and foremost that we NEVER have to plant them!  They come up every year on their own.  I'll clarify that a bit, though.  The first Beauregard sweet potatoes were from sweet potato ends we composted that grew the next year.  We actually did plant 3 Golden Wonder heirloom sweet potatoes a couple of years ago.  After the first years' harvest, they came up with a vengeance and have taken over 1/3 of the garden with their vines.

Beauregard and Golden Wonder Sweet Potato vines

The Garbers raise sweet potatoes in big fields just east of us.  They are heavily mechanized.  We are not.  Here's how we do it - I pull the vines back on a strip about four feet wide and cut the vines, throwing them over the fence to the cows and goats who voraciously devour them and beg for more.  Then, with a shovel, I carefully turn the soil over, pulling sweet potato tubers from the ground.  Yes, sometimes I accidentally cut them in half.

I keep a wagon nearby and we fill it, one by one, with beautiful sweet potatoes.  Behold the perfect sweet potato!:

Sweet potatoes are delicious to eat.  However, they are also good for you, too.  They are a great source of Vitamin C.  They are high in potassium which regulates your heartbeat.  As if to accentuate the fact that sweet potatoes are heart-healthy, I dug this one out of the ground:

I Heart Sweet Potatoes!

I think it is also great for your heart in terms of the cardio-workout you get when you dig them all up.  Boy, were we exhausted!

We had a full wagon and the cows were finished eating the vines.  Now, they came and begged for the sweet potatoes themselves.  We shared a few with the beggars...

We went through the entire wagon and hand sorted them into 5 buckets.  Going clockwise in the photo below - One for the super-large, one for the mediums, one for the cut up ones, one for the small ones, and one for the super small that will be used to feed the cows special treats.

The buckets were poured into onion sacks and they'll be hung in the garage for a couple of months to cure.  This makes them sweeter and helps them store better.

I weighed all the sacks and we harvested a total of 186 pounds of sweet potatoes this year.  A bumper crop!  Not bad for a crop we never have to plant.