About a month ago we harvested about one third of our sweet potato crop. We allowed the rest to grow and then a couple of days ago, I enlisted the help of my sweet potato digger/wife. We have a segregation of duties. I clip the vines and toss them to the cows, and she finds where the sweet potatoes are and digs them up, trying not to disturb the soil. She puts the sweet potatoes in a bucket and has another bucket for the small sweet potato roots to feed the cows. As you can see, they gather around the fence to eat.
As soon as we finish a section, I prepare the seedbed by pulling back the wood chip mulch to expose the soil. Then I work up soil for planting with a hoe. I planted a row of Monstrueux de Viroflay Spinach. It is an heirloom spinach from France that dates back to 1866. Then I planted a row of Galilee spinach from Israel that I saved from seed from last year. Finally I planted a half row of mustard greens and a half row of a new crop I got as a Free Seed from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds. It's called mizuna, a Japanese mustard. I've never heard of it. We'll see how it grows and how it tastes. It's supposed to be like mustard greens, but peppery.
Here is an example of some of the harvest. You can see that these are Beauregard sweet potatoes. The majority of the crop that we have harvested is the Golden Wonder heirloom. Tricia suggested that we try to pull up the heirloom and keep only the Beauregard sweet potatoes for next year's crop. The Beauregard sweet potatoes are larger and prettier.
As you can see in the photo below, we've been curing the ones we dug up a month ago by hanging them from onion sacks in the garage for a month. We graded them and have four sacks like this hanging.
Since we harvested last, we have a new method of curing sweet potatoes (and potatoes, onions, peas, etc.) A gentleman from our church dropped off a drying wagon that he made. He made himself a larger one and offered to give this one to us!
It has casters and wheels and a trailer hitch so we can pull it around.
The frame is lined with hardware cloth so that it promotes good airflow around the potatoes.
This will come in handy. Once we harvest the rest of the sweet potatoes, we'll weigh them up to see the total weight of the sweet potato harvest for 2022. The ones we dug last month ought to be cured and sweet and ready to eat!
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