October 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest Begins

Each year October arrives.  College Football season is in full swing.  The first cool front blows in.  A few leaves start falling and you realize it is time to dig some sweet potatoes.  In springtime every year for the past 15 years or so, sweet potatoes pop up voluntarily (unplanted) and take over the garden.  Every year I say it, but it is so neat that this is one crop we never have to plant or tend to.  The vines gobble up 1/3 of the total square footage in the garden.  It looks like a jungle.  If you walk through it, you wouldn't think that there is so much going on beneath the surface of the soil.

I'm not gonna lie.  Digging sweet potatoes isn't an easy task.  You must get a shovel and turn over every square foot of soil, searching through and picking out the sweet potatoes you've unearthed.  The sweet potatoes ain't gonna dig themselves.  Let's get busy!

Beautiful sweet potatoes are just under the soil hiding.  We dig them out and toss them into buckets.

As soon as we dig them up and before weeds can overtake the garden, we're doing a new thing this year - we are putting a 6 inch layer of wood chip mulch over the dug up soil.  We'll talk more about this tomorrow or Thursday.  If you compare the first photo in this post with the one below, you can see that we are a little better than halfway through the harvest.  Wood chips line the harvested ground.

Here's where Tricia gets involved.  She's not real keen on digging, but she is a good "sweet potato sorter and grader."  She goes through all the harvested sweet potatoes so far and separates them by size.  We have a bunch more to sort/grade when I finish harvesting the other half of the sweet potato patch.

In the first bucket, we have the "bits and pieces."  These are the small roots that are just not worth it to peel and cook as they are too small.  Many of these get accidentally left in the soil and sprout up next year.  These we picked, however, get used by adding to our cow's feed.  Cows love sweet potatoes!

The next bucket contains the small sweet potatoes.  These will be peeled and cooked to make latkes, mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato hash browns and sweet potato pie or empanadas.

Then Tricia has graded out some large ones.  These will be baked in the oven, cut in half and put melted butter over them.  Yum!

And finally, there are the mutants.  These are ridiculously large.  They are definitely edible, but you have to watch them as some of them will be stringy or woody.

It is crazy how monstrous some of these are.  Look at Big Bertha, right here:

Nothing is wasted in this harvest.  I think the animals have October circled on their calendar.  They love it when we harvest, because the sweet potato vines get tossed over the fence and there is a fall feast going on!  From the 9 o'clock position in the photo below, there is Salt, Pepper, Rosie, Annie, and Clarabelle all eating the vines.  They'll eat and eat and eat until they can't eat anymore.

I'm hoping to finish up the harvest by the weekend.  We'll give an update soon.