We Dig Sweet Potatoes

Just prior to Thanksgiving, I got busy digging up sweet potatoes from the "jungle" that grows up each and every year.  Well over a decade ago it all started with a Beauregard sweet potato thrown in the compost pile.  Since that time they have come up on their own every year.  At some point, maybe 10 years ago, I planted some Golden Wonder heirloom sweet potatoes that I got from a guy named the barefoot farmer up in Tennessee at a sustainable agriculture conference.  Those things were prolific.  They ended up crowding out all of our Beauregards.

Golden Wonders are smaller sweet potatoes, but they are delicious.  I told Tricia next year I'm going to get the Beauregards reestablished in the garden.  Here is a photo of all the sweet potato vines just prior to our digging.

Years ago, I dug up the whole sweet potato patch with a shovel, but I learned quickly that some garden forks do the job better and easier.  The only thing you really have to watch out for is forking right through the middle of a big, fat sweet potato.  

This is the standard size of a Golden Wonder.  The flesh is a light orange color.  The Beauregard is a bigger sweet potato with a deep dark orange color.

I generally begin digging on the south end of the patch and dig in three foot swaths, putting the sweet potatoes in a wagon and the vines in a big blue tub that I toss over to the cows.  The LOVE sweet potato vines.

Pretty soon, after some back-breaking labor, the sweet potato patch has been completely dug up.

We then sort the sweet potatoes.  The huge ones on the left.  The large to average sized ones in the middle.  The small to tiny sized one in the red bucket.  The ones in the red bucket will be fed to the cows.

Finally, I got the rock rake and leveled out the freshly dug earth.  This will be planted this week with spinach, mustard greens, radishes and turnips.

Overall, it was an average crop.  I'm not going to complain.  We used several nice ones to make the "Ruth's Chris Steakhouse sweet potato casserole" recipe for Thanksgiving.  It was a tasty side dish for sure.

Cold For the Cows

More cold weather came this week.  This time not in the single digits and no snow.  It was in the mid-20's for two days in a row, so we had ice.  The sun was out, and that was a plus, but both days it stayed below freezing for 12 hours in a row.  That means that there is no water for the cows, goats, and chickens.  All the water troughs are frozen over.  I know in the north they have heaters to keep them from freezing, but that makes no sense down here.  You can see how I have the pipes wrapped to hopefully avoid pipe breakage.  We will see if we were successful when we turn the water back on.

I have a pipe that I walk around to all the troughs and break the ice.  There are some tasks like popping the little air bubbles in packing wrap that no matter how old you get, it brings great joy to do.  Breaking ice is another one of those tasks.  For some reason it is cathartic.

See here's a big trough.  We had a game growing up called "Break the Ice."  You had hammers and you would try to knock out cubes taking turns with your opponent, without making the ice cubes fall.  Maybe that's what I'm thinking of that makes it so tempting to break.

The first hit breaks through...

And then it all shatters, allowing all the animals to drink water again.

For a special treat, we bring some root crops for the cows to eat.  Sometimes beets, sometimes turnips, but today Tricia had cut up some of our sweet potatoes that had bad spots.  Cows love them some sweet potatoes.

Here is LuLu begging for some sweet potatoes.  Cows have this super cool trick they do where they can stick their tongues in their nostrils.  Try it to see if you are that talented.  My tongue is not nearly long enough.

LuLu gobbled up many sweet potato chunks.  The other animals didn't get any.  Since LuLu is in milk, she gets special favors.

Now that the ice is broken and LuLu has eaten her fill of sweet potatoes, Mrs. Tricia and I will go inside and sit by the fire to warm up.

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.

What to do With a Bunch of Sweet Potatoes

We have a lot of sweet potatoes from this year's harvest in the garden.  We've been baking a lot of them and making Thai curry sweet potato lentil soup and a Sweet Potato, kale and coconut milk soup.  During the holidays, we like to do something else with them I'll show you today.  My wife is Mexican-American and grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas.  

A tradition she brought to us was making sweet potato empanadas.  She uses a recipe from her mother that's been passed down.  For this dish, we wanted to use up some of our largest sweet potatoes.  I peeled and cut them up.

Tricia cooked them and then mashed them with a potato masher until it had a smooth consistency.  She added allspice and molasses to the sweet potatoes.

She made her normal dough for making flour tortillas, but then added some cinnamon to the dough, rolled them out and then we started loading the sweet potato filling onto the dough.

Then you fold the dough over and crimp the edges.  We also come back with a fork to "seal" the edges a little later.

The holiday baking is a true family affair.  We had an assembly line going in the kitchen with Tricia rolling out the dough and filling with sweet potato filling, Russ folding over and sealing the empanadas and arranging on the baking tray.  Benjamin rested up for his job.

Benjamin, well rested and exuberant was now ready for his job.  He brushed an egg wash onto the empanadas.

It is hard to estimate to get the amount of dough needed for the amount of sweet potato filling, but that's okay.  Leftover tortilla dough is not wasted!  We sprinkle cinnamon and sugar and bake just the dough.

We couldn't wait for the buzzer on the oven to go off, announcing the empanadas were done!  We pulled the golden brown pastries out of the oven and placed on a cooling rack.

And this is where my job comes into play.  I'm the official "taster" of the warm batch of empanadas.  I broke one in half and enjoyed the nice fragrance.  Then I took a bite!

Yeah, this one is delicious.  The entire batch of empanadas didn't last but a couple of days.  That's too bad.  However, empanadas aren't really just limited to a Christmas baking thing.  We have a bunch more sweet potatoes.  We'll have to make another batch of these again soon.

Sweet Potato Harvest Part II

 

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.

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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!

Sunday Night Rambling

Perhaps tomorrow night we'll talk about the world situation and how it relates to FOOD.  What can you do to prepare at this late time?  Tonight, I don't want to talk about serious things.  I'd rather just relax and show you some photos and discuss things lighter in nature.

What you are seeing on the stoneware baking sheet below are sweet potatoes.  These are an heirloom variety that comes up every year in the garden.  They are called Golden Wonder and come from Tennessee.  A guy called "the barefoot gardener" (Jeff Poppin) mailed them to me, we planted them, and the grow every year alongside the existing Beauregard variety.

Each year we dig up over a hundred pounds!  We harvested back in October and still have some left.  We always eat the biggest first.  What we're left with now are the smaller ones.  We like to cut them in half, brush them with melted butter and bake them.  They are so sweet and delicious!  I expect to see the slips (sprouts) coming up in the garden for this year's crop any day now.  Usually by the time the existing crop is gone, the new crop is on its way.

I picked the last of the carrots from the fall crop this weekend.  I had picked all the Danvers variety (orange) last week.  On Saturday, I pulled the last of the remaining Cosmic Purple Carrots and Atomic Red Carrots.  Sounds kind of psychedelic, doesn't it?  They are pretty.  They taste like a normal carrot, though. 

The Cosmic Purple carrots are purple on the outside, but the interior is orange.  The Atomic Red carrots, however, are red through and through.  

As we switch the seasons from fall to spring, we had some work to do on preserving the crops.  We had a few heads of cabbage left and it gave us an idea.  We'd make Kimchi.  We hadn't done that in a while.  Kimchi is a Korean side dish made from cabbage, carrots, ginger, green onions, radishes, and garlic.  All of those items are shredded and mixed up.  Then salt is added and whey.  The mixture is pounded to release the juices and then packed tightly into quart jars.  It is set out on the counter for three days at room temperature.  It ferments and then is put into the refrigerator for long storage.  The longer you keep it, the better it tastes.  Here it is on the third day of fermentation before putting it in the fridge.

It has a tangy flavor and is a good, cool, side dish.  The fermented radishes we showed you In This Post are done now.  We've been eating them in salads and just as a tasty snack.  Tomorrow we'll tackle weightier subjects.

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.