2019 Sweet Potato Harvest By the Numbers

One last post on the 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest.  Here's how the sweet potato patch looked prior to digging them up:

Before

And here is an "after" shot once all the sweet potatoes were dug up, vines were tossed to the animals to eat, and a 4 inch layer of wood chips was spread on the soil to cover:

After

Quite a change, huh? As discussed in a previous post, we separated them out into different containers, grading them in four categories:

• Small roots and Pieces (to feed the cows),
• Small
• Medium
• Large Monster Sweet Potatoes (took two buckets to hold 'em)

I placed each container on our bathroom scale in order to see how many pounds of sweet potatoes were produced this year.  We always like to keep good records to see how things stacked up year over year.

And here is the final tally after all of them were weighed:

The large sweet potatoes weighed a total of 50 pounds.  The mediums weighed a total of 74 pounds.  The small weighed a total of 68 pounds and the bits and pieces weighed 34 pounds.  The grand total of the sweet potato harvest was 226 pounds.  Let's subtract out the small ones we'll feed to the cows.  We harvested 192 pounds of sweet potatoes for us to consume.  That surpassed our previous record harvest of 186 pounds back in 2017.

I bagged them up in onion sacks and hung them from the ceiling in the garage.  This allows good air flow.  It is best to allow sweet potatoes to cure for a minimum of 3 weeks to allow the starch to convert to sugar.  This makes for a better tasting sweet potato.

We look forward to eating a bunch of sweet potatoes over the next year.  The first ones will be cured and ready around Thanksgiving.  Perfect!