Clearing the Sweet Potatoes Out to Make Room for the Fall Garden

We harvested a few sweet potatoes week before last, but this weekend I had a large task ahead of me.  With cooler weather and shorter days looming, it is time to get the fall garden in the ground - actually it is past time.  Before planting the fall garden, I first had to harvest all of the sweet potatoes.  The vines had consumed 1/4 of the enter garden space, leaving no room to pull up rows to plant carrots, beets, mustard, radishes, parsley, swiss chard and sugar snap peas.

Saturday morning I rolled out of bed earlier than normal, milked the cows, did the rest of the morning chores, and then got out the garden forks and began to turn over soil, unearthing sweet potatoes and bunches and bunches of earthworms.  The earthworms are proof to me that the garden soil is getting better and better each year.

You can see the lush sweet potato vines that cover the garden.  In the photo below, you can also see the garden forks that I use to turn the soil over in harvesting the sweet potatoes.

As I worked further southward, my bucket of sweet potatoes began to slowly fill with Beauregard Sweet Potatoes.

At night, the sweet potato flowers close.  In the morning, their flowers slowly begin opening.

Soon their lavender flowers with a purple interior is wide open...

As I pulled the vines away from the ground, they exposed many sweet potatoes waiting to be dug up. 

Some sweet potatoes, as shown below, are almost entirely on the top of the ground, Others, like the photo above are only partially exposed.  Some are completely hidden and are only found when you turn the soil over.

Tricia comes out and digs with me and she sorts the sweet potatoes and grades them into different sized onion sacks based on size - Huge, Medium, and Small.  Ultra small will be fed to the cows.  Cows love eating sweet potatoes!  So do people!

The cows and goats and chickens love to eat the sweet potato vines that I toss over the fence.  First, they eat all the leaves off.  Then they begin chewing on the vines themselves.  By the end of the day, there is nothing left!  We like to joke that after eating all that, the milk is sweeter!

We hang the four onion sacks of graded out sweet potatoes in the garage from the "Garfish," our canoe.  They'll hang and cure for a month or so, and then we'll begin to eat them.

This weekend I was able to harvest all of the potatoes.  Now we have room to get the fall garden in!