Harvesting the 2020 Sweet Potato Crop

2020 has been a crazy year.  Things need to get back to normal, and we made a start at doing just that this weekend.  A cool front actually moved in, making the mornings enjoyable.  Low humidity.  Temperatures in the sixties.  Time to do what we normally do in early October - Harvest Sweet Potatoes.

The sweet potatoes would continue growing; however, we need the real estate that the sweet potatoes now occupy to plant carrots, lettuce, beets and turnips.  Look at the jungle below.  Those are sweet potato vines.  The nice thing about them, I always say, is that we never plant them.  They come up on their own every year from one that we composted many years ago.  The gift that keeps on giving.

Now you must be very careful to not cut the sweet potatoes, but I take a shovel and gently turn the soil over, unearthing hundreds of the things.  Nice ones.

The sweet potatoes below are the Beauregard variety.  They were developed in 1987 at LSU.  These were the ones that started it all many years ago.  We bought one of these at the grocery store, ate it and disposed of the remainder in the compost.  It grew and vined across the garden, leaving numerous tubers.  We missed harvesting a few of those and more grew the next year...  And the next...

And these are Golden Wonders.  They are an heirloom variety that Jeff Poppin, the Barefoot Gardner, gave us at a sustainable agriculture conference.  We planted them and they grew.  They are now taking over the garden as well.  Tricia likes the Beauregard variety better.  Next year I'll make an attempt to weed out some of the Golden Wonders to leave room for more Beauregards.

Generally, I start pulling up vines and the cows come running.  People tell me cows aren't smart, but I tell you, they remember sweet potato harvest.  The leaves and vines must be as delicious as the potatoes, because the cows love them.

The vines usually grow from a single tuber, but they send down roots at various places and generate more sweet potatoes.  The one old sweet potato can yield many, many sweet potatoes.  Below you can see where it all started.

When you pull one up like this, it is a HUGE sweet potato!  Most of the time, it is too woody, or stringy to eat, but we give it a try.  If it is bad, the cows are chickens have less discriminating taste buds than we do!

Digging up sweet potatoes is a big job.  We've turned over a big chunk of the garden with a shovel.  Over the next week, we'll plant this land with carrots, lettuce, beets, turnips, among other things.  Then we will apply a four inch coating of mulch.

We are finding that using the Back to Eden gardening method, the mulch is improving the soil.  Hopefully soon, we won't have to turn over the soil to harvest.  Instead, we'll simply pull the sweet potatoes from the soil by our hands.  Tomorrow, I'll show you the next step in the sweet potato harvest.