Trying a New Variety

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that for the last 20 years we have sweet potatoes that come up volunteer each and every year.  We never have to plant them and yet receive a nice harvest every fall.  It all started from composting one Beauregard Sweet Potato.  That one sweet potato expanded and multiplied.  To that, we added an heirloom variety called Golden Wonder, that we picked up from a guy called "The Barefoot Gardener" in Tennessee.  The Golden Wonders were prolific, producing a nice tasting sweet potato, but not as rich of a color and flavor as the Beauregard.  To add insult to injury, the Golden Wonder's crowded out the Beauregards.

Just to the east and north of us in a community between Evangeline and Iota is a farming family named Garber.  Everyone else around here grows rice.  They grow sweet potatoes.  I picked up a box of a variety they grow called Evangeline from our local feed store.  Admittedly, I purchased them to eat.  We made sweet potato fries, and I'll vouch for the flavor.  Yum!  But the other reason I bought the box was to attempt to get a local variety growing in our garden again.

No matter how thorough you are when digging sweet potatoes, you always miss a root.  From that root comes new sweet potato plants.  Here is a Golden Wonder growing up this spring.  My idea this year is to pull up 2/3's of these to allow room for the Evangeline's to get a foothold.

I picked out eight sweet potatoes from the box that were on the smaller side - we want to eat the big ones!  I also picked the ones that had "slips" or sprouts growing out from one end.

This sprout will grow out a vine.  Now you can put the sweet potato in water and the slips will grow out.  You can then clip them and they'll develop roots and grow.  I think I'm just going to plant the potato whole.  That's what we did with the Beauregard a long time ago and it grew without planting individual slips.  We'll see if this works.

I dug a shallow hole in the north part of the garden and planted the potatoes with the sprouts sticking up.

I watered them in and marked where I planted them with blue flags.

I'll keep a close eye on them.  We will hopefully experience a good growth of the Evangeline variety of sweet potato in our garden, allowing them to establish themselves so we can enjoy them year after year.

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.

Sweet Potato Harvest 2021

For the umpteenth year in a row, the sweet potatoes came up on their own and invaded almost a quarter of the space in the garden.  The vines, coaxed by the fertile soil, warm sunshine and an abundance of rain, grew so fast you could almost watch it grow!  The crop originally started from a Beauregard Sweet Potato we buried in the compost pile maybe two decades ago.  It subsequently sprouted and spread across the garden that year and every year since.  Probably 5 - 10 years ago, we planted a Tennessee heirloom sweet potato called, Golden Wonder, and it has done the same.

Each year in October, we harvest the sweet potatoes.  We NEED the space in the garden to plant the fall crop, so the sweet potato vines come up and get fed to the cows.  The sweet potatoes themselves get dug up and then the ground gets worked and seeds get planted - all in one fell swoop.

I might also mention that sweet potato vines have pretty blooms that you can see amongst the vines.

Here is the leaf of a Beauregard Sweet Potato.  It was developed right here in Louisiana.  You can see that it has a readily identifiable heart shaped leaf.  We like these the best.  The flesh is deep orange and sweet.  The tubers are long and fat.

And here is the leaf on the vine of a Golden wonder sweet potato.  Their leaves are more spiked than the Beauregard.  True to its name, the Golden Wonder has flesh that is golden to yellow in color.  The tubers can be long like the Beauregard, but many are more rounded in shape.

The first step is to pull the vines.  Sometimes, the sweet potato will pop right out of the ground.  As the soil improves, that is what is supposed to happen.

Our process works like this:  We pull back the vines for about a four foot by 15 foot area and toss the vines over to the cows and goats to eat.  Those critters love them some sweet potato vines.  They must be sweet because they eat all the leaves first and then devour most of the vines, too.

When the vines are pulled back, sometimes you can spot the sweet potatoes like below:

These are simple.  You give them a tug and most of the time, they pop right out of the ground.  Many times, though, you can't see them and have to dig up the entire area so you don't miss them.

This is just a beautiful Beauregard Sweet Potato!  I'd like to tell you that they were ALL like this, but I'd be pulling your leg.  We'll show you a little more on the different sizes and how we grade them in the post tomorrow.

Here is a Golden Wonder.  Tricia has a preference for the Beauregard variety.  Next year, we will discourage the growth of the Golden Wonders and allow the Beauregard variety to proliferate.  Right now the Golden Wonders are overtaking the Beauregards.

We had a nice harvest this year and will have plenty sweet potatoes to eat over the winter.  They store nicely, so we don't have to worry about them going bad.  Tomorrow, we'll document our grading process, our curing process and document the total weight of the 2021 harvest.

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.

Next Up for Harvest in October - Sweet Potatoes!

Before the sun went down on Saturday, I checked in on the status of our sweet potato crop.  Always at this time of the year, the sweet potato vines have covered almost a third of the garden.  Similar to other years, the vines (or slips) just come up on their own each spring.  We've never had to plant them.  They grew from composting the remnants of a Beauregard Sweet Potato we bought at the grocery store.  The annual sweet potato crops where (probably by now) over a thousand pounds of sweet potatoes have been harvested due to that fortuitous activity of composting!

Let me correct something in that previous paragraph.  We did actually plant three sweet potatoes about five years ago after getting an heirloom sweet potato variety called "Golden Wonder" while at a sustainable agriculture conference in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Both produce nice sweet potatoes, but Tricia likes the Beauregards the best.  I think I do too.  In looking at the vines below, they are lush, thick and healthy.  Although you can't judge a book by its cover, you can usually expect a good harvest if the vines look like this.

Sweet potatoes generally take between 3 to 5 months to mature.  They've been growing since late spring, so in a couple of weeks when October rolls around, I'll clip the vines, feed them to the cows, and begin digging potatoes.  They will continue growing until the frost kills them, but I need that space to plant sugar snap peas, and carrots, kale, parsley, bok choy, spinach, radishes, turnips and other items in our fall lineup.

The cows came running up to the fence when they saw me in the garden.  They share in the sweet potato harvest as we always toss the vines over the fence.  When I tell you cows love sweet potato vines, I am not exaggerating.  I just couldn't tell them to wait until October.  I took my clippers and snipped off some vines to share with the cows.  There you go, cows.  I think they consider this to be an amuse-bouche. 

Rosie, Clarabelle, Luna, Aussie and Clarabull gathered to dine on the sweet vines.  The goats arrived, too.  

When you clip sweet potato vines a sticky, white, milky substance oozes from the vines.  It will get on your hands and stain them.  I'm sure it must be very sweet,  The cows eat the leaves first and then they take their time chewing the vines.  Later, they sat in the shade and chewed their cud, satisfied with their good fortune and looking forward to the weekend in October when they'll get to eat a bunch more.  We're looking forward to that day, too, as hopefully we'll fill a few sacks with fat sweet potatoes.

A Bumper Crop of Sweet Potatoes!

Every year it seems when I post about the harvest of sweet potatoes, we say the same thing, but here goes:

Sweet potatoes are a great crop for several reasons - first and foremost that we NEVER have to plant them!  They come up every year on their own.  I'll clarify that a bit, though.  The first Beauregard sweet potatoes were from sweet potato ends we composted that grew the next year.  We actually did plant 3 Golden Wonder heirloom sweet potatoes a couple of years ago.  After the first years' harvest, they came up with a vengeance and have taken over 1/3 of the garden with their vines.

Beauregard and Golden Wonder Sweet Potato vines

The Garbers raise sweet potatoes in big fields just east of us.  They are heavily mechanized.  We are not.  Here's how we do it - I pull the vines back on a strip about four feet wide and cut the vines, throwing them over the fence to the cows and goats who voraciously devour them and beg for more.  Then, with a shovel, I carefully turn the soil over, pulling sweet potato tubers from the ground.  Yes, sometimes I accidentally cut them in half.

I keep a wagon nearby and we fill it, one by one, with beautiful sweet potatoes.  Behold the perfect sweet potato!:

Sweet potatoes are delicious to eat.  However, they are also good for you, too.  They are a great source of Vitamin C.  They are high in potassium which regulates your heartbeat.  As if to accentuate the fact that sweet potatoes are heart-healthy, I dug this one out of the ground:

I Heart Sweet Potatoes!

I think it is also great for your heart in terms of the cardio-workout you get when you dig them all up.  Boy, were we exhausted!

We had a full wagon and the cows were finished eating the vines.  Now, they came and begged for the sweet potatoes themselves.  We shared a few with the beggars...

We went through the entire wagon and hand sorted them into 5 buckets.  Going clockwise in the photo below - One for the super-large, one for the mediums, one for the cut up ones, one for the small ones, and one for the super small that will be used to feed the cows special treats.

The buckets were poured into onion sacks and they'll be hung in the garage for a couple of months to cure.  This makes them sweeter and helps them store better.

I weighed all the sacks and we harvested a total of 186 pounds of sweet potatoes this year.  A bumper crop!  Not bad for a crop we never have to plant.

Putting in our 2016 Sweet Potato Crop (3 Different Methods)

We harvest sweet potatoes each fall and to be honest, they are the easiest crop we grow.  Why? Because we never plant them.  They come up in the garden each year on their own.  We dig them up when they are ripe and eat them and the cows eat the vines.  It is a win-win situation for all involved.

Here is one of the sweet potato plants that came up again this year.  I was trying to think of how many consecutive years they've come up and it has been so long, I just can't put a number to it.  Safely, I'd estimate 9 years, perhaps?  Pretty neat, I tell you!  The sweet potato leaves shown below have some bug damage, but they'll be alright.  This variety (probably a Beauregard) will vine out and re-root and spread all over the garden making sweet potato tubers all throughout the garden.

Volunteer Sweet Potatoes

So that was method #1.  For method #2, see below.  In the pot that contains our (Tricia & I) 25th Anniversary Alamo oak seedling, Russ also has something else sweet growing in there.  He pulled some slips off of some sweet potato varieties from some of the LSU Sweet Potatoes he brought home. They rooted quickly and I'll plant those in the garden as well.

LSU Sweet Potatoes

And here is method #3:  In This Post we mentioned that we had received some heirloom sweet potatoes from Tennessee.  I think they are called "Golden Wonder." They taste like they have honey and cinnamon in them, but none of that was added. It is just natural.  Well, in that post, we planted the 3 sweet potatoes.  One rotted, but two grew and really flourished!  Notice the different leaves. While the Beauregard and LSU sweet potatoes have heart-shaped leaves, the leaves on the heirloom has and odd-shape.

Golden Wonder Heirloom Sweet Potatoes

So in talking to Russ (my son who is a junior at LSU majoring in Horticulture), he educated me a little in growing sweet potatoes.  He told me that we can make MANY sweet potato plants off of these.  So, there are several ways to do this:  You can cut off portions of each growth coming up from the sweet potato and plant.  If you keep the soil moist, each section will root and become its own distinct plant.

Or you can simply pull up each growth coming out of the ground.  You won't get as many plants, but those plants will have roots and will likely all survive.  So that's what I did.  Take a look at the healthy root system on this Golden Wonder slip:

Sweet Potato root system

Then you simply put that plant in the ground like you would with any transplant and water it.

Out of the pot and into the garden (Golden Wonder)

I did the exact same thing with the slips from the LSU sweet potatoes that were growing with the live oak tree.

Out of the pot and into the garden (LSU sweet potato)

By the time I finished planting them, it was getting dark.  I watered them in good.

All Planted now

I'll add one other thing.  All of the Golden wonder slips came off of one of the two plants that we had growing in the pot.  I planted the second whole plant (with no slips separated) out near the muscadine trellis.  Sweet potatoes, if allowed to trellis (and not vine on the ground) will produce seeds.  These seeds can be harvested and used plant next year's crop.  I didn't even know that sweet potatoes produced seeds!

Russ will teach us how to do this.  You have to do something called scarifying the seed (by mechanized means or with sulfuric acid) in order to induce germination. Hopefully, we'll be able to get our own heirloom sweet potatoes to begin producing here.  Of course we'll keep you updated with yield.  Now we have 3 different varieties growing.