Sweet Potato Harvest In Progress - 2024

The latter part of October and early part of November is the traditional time that we dig up our sweet potato crop and begin curing them.  October was so DRY I didn't know how in the world I was going to dig them in the hard, dry ground, so I began irrigating to soften the soil.  As it turned out, if I would have waited a couple of days, I would have gotten rainfall for free.

Here is our sweet potato patch.  It's a pretty good amount of space where the sweet potatoes come up volunteer each and every year for well over 15 years now.  We don't ever have to plant the slips.  Most of them are and heirloom variety from Tennessee called "Golden Wonder."  The remainder are Beauregards from right here at home.  I'll show you our process...

I use clippers to clip the vines in about a 3 foot section of ground.  Russ showed me an efficient procedure.  As you clip them, you roll them up like you would a blanket.  I'll show you what we do with the vines at the end of this post.  Once the vines are out of the way, I use a digging fork to turn the soil.  I'm looking for the sweet potatoes as I turn the soil, being very careful not to hit them in the process.

Beauregards

Underneath the vines, the 4 inches of mulch has mostly decomposed and turned to topsoil.  As the soil is turned, it is soft, not compacted and full of earthworms and organic matter.  

Here is the sweet potato patch with two 3 foot rows harvested.  Now as soon as the strips have been dug, I'm quick to put a new 4 inch layer of mulch on top of the soil.

Now the third row is dug, so that leaves about half of the patch left to harvest.  And that's when it started raining.  We've gotten almost 4 inches of rain since this photo, so the sweet potato harvest has been postponed until the ground dries up.

Previously, I had talked about rolling up all the vines like a blanket or carpet to clear the ground prior to commencing the digging process.  The roll of vines are loaded into a wagon and brought to the cows and goats.  The absolutely love the vines.  They must be as sweet as the sweet potatoes.  In about 30 minutes, they have the vines and leaves cleaned up!  Those are some happy girls.  The next morning we find that LuLu's production has increased.  We call it "sweet potato milk."

With about half of the patch dug, we have a crate of an assortment of sizes, shapes and varieties of sweet potatoes.

As soon as we finish harvesting, we'll sort the sweet potatoes into various sizes.  We always save the smallest for the cows.  Then we'll bag them up in onion sacks and hang in the garage to cure.  That allows them to get sweet.  We'll post that once we finish up harvesting.