Sorting the Sweet Potato Harvest

Once the sweet potatoes were all dug up, I quickly put a new 4 inch layer of wood chip mulch on top of the ground as it's very important to keep the soil covered.  The sweet potatoes we harvested went into several buckets for temporary storage/curing, but they're all mixed in size.  We pick all of them we dig, from the smallest root to the largest.  One of the reasons that they grow back every single year is that if you leave any root at all in the ground, they will grow into sweet potato plants next year.  There's no way to dig them all up, so you are virtually guaranteed another sweet potato harvest the next year.  Or that's how it's worked for us for the last 20 years.

We sat out by the fire pit this weekend with empty buckets to sort out, the goal being to put the smallest into one bucket which will be fed to the cows.  Cows absolutely love sweet potatoes!  Then, we'll sort out the biggest ones into a crate.  These are the "bakers," for human consumption, of course.  Finally, we put the mediums in another.  These we'll use to either make 'mashed sweet potatoes' or we'll slice in half and bake.

Here are the largest of the 'bakers.'  They are a mix of Beauregards and Golden Wonders.  Not a whole bunch of them, but that's okay.

Here is a crate of the mediums - by far the most of what we dug up.

Finally, we have a bucket of the smalls and those that have bad or soft spots on them.  These will be fed to the cows in the next few days.

Although we didn't weigh them this year, my best guesstimate is that we harvested a little over 100 pounds this year.  That's a little shy of our normal year's sweet potato production.  We'll allow them to cure in the garage for a few weeks and will then start eating them.  Now that the sweet potatoes are harvested a re-mulched, I have some additional space for planting, so I added some composted chicken litter to the soil and planted a row of spinach (two varieties), a row of mustard greens, and a row of radishes.  The only thing left to plant is turnips.  I hope to have that done at some point tomorrow.  I love turnip greens!