The Latest Harvest Ever

Of sweet potatoes, that is.  Normally, we are harvesting sweet potatoes in October to make room for fall garden planting.  This year was different.  The drought had curtailed the normal sweet potato vine growth.  Normally, the vines would have grown by leaps and bounds, filling a full quarter of the garden acreage.  With the lack of rainfall, the vines were puny.  The watering I did every day with a water hose was a poor substitute for God's rainfall.  It kept them alive, but they didn't thrive.

We decided to go ahead and let the sweet potatoes continue to grow as much as possible, until the vines were hurt by a frost.  We like to get a double harvest - one for us and one for the animals.  We eat the sweet potatoes and the animals get to devour the vines.  It's a win-win situation!  Here it is January.  We've had a few frosts that has burned the vines.  I figured it was time to start harvesting.  Hopefully, the extra two months will have given time for sweet potato growth.  We're about to find out.  

Here are the vines.  Normally, they are lush and fill the space.  But we'll see.  It's what's BELOW the ground that counts.

The trick is that I don't want to turn over more soil than I have to.  I use pruning shears to cut the vines back to where they go in the ground.  Then I get my digging forks and gently dig in that area only.  If you are real careful, you can dig up some nice ones.  

If you're not real careful, you end up cutting into the sweet potatoes with the forks.  In my little harvest, I have a process.  The big ones get tossed into a bucket.  The small ones get tossed into another bucket.  The big ones will be cured and eaten.  The small ones will be fed to the cows.  Those girls just love sweet potatoes.  You can hear the crunching of the sweet potatoes in their mouths.

I finished the harvest this afternoon.  We harvested about 70 pounds of sweet potatoes.  Normally, we get a little better than 100 pounds.  The yield is down, but that was expected.  The sweet potatoes were placed into two crawfish (or onion) sacks.  Those two sacks were hung from the canoe to cure.

We will allow them to hang in the garage and cure for a couple of months.  Doing this allows the skins to toughen up and most importantly, the sugars to get sweeter.

We'll wait for the rest of them to cure, but I'll admit, we cooked two of them in a Coconut Curry Sweet potato soup.  Delicious!  In the next few weeks the 2024 sweet potato crop should start growing.  How does this happen?  On its own.  We always miss some of the tubers in the ground.  Those sprout and grow for us next year's crop.  It's happened like that every year for the last decade or so.  It's the gift that keeps on giving.