Curing and Weighing the 2021 Sweet Potato Crop

To finish up the sweet potato post from last night, we'll tell you that once you dig them up, you're not quite done!  The hard work is done, but you can't kick your feet up just yet.  We gather all of the harvest together and use different tubs or containers to sort and grade the sweet potatoes into different sizes.  We sort them (from smallest to largest) from the small ones deemed "Cattle Feed," because the cows love 'em, to medium, to large 'bakers', to Jumbo.  

We separate them and pour all the ones for human consumption into onion sacks.  Onion sacks are breathable mesh and allow air flow to dry them out.  You don't want to wash them - leave them with dirt on them or they may start to rot.  I hang them up in the garage and will leave them there for 2 - 3 weeks.  During this curing period, the starches will convert to sugars, the scratches and scars on the sweet potatoes will heal, and the skins will get a little tougher.

Here are the JUMBOs!  It is hard to see perspective, but these guys are big - too big for any one person to eat.  We cut these up for eating.  Jumbos are the largest in size, but smallest in number from the crop.

Here are the large 'bakers.'  These are the classic, traditional size you see in the produce department.  They are the perfect size for baking, cutting open, and putting a big pat of butter to melt inside.  Maybe you like to sprinkle a dash of cinnamon or two.  We got one full sack of these - the second largest volume grade we harvested.

These are the medium sized ones.  We got two sacks of these - the largest graded amount harvested.  This is the size we primarily peel and mash.  They make great Mashed Sweet Potatoes.  We also cut these up to make Sweet Potato Fries.

And that concludes the sweet potato harvest of 2021.  We'll eat on these for several months.  It still amazes us that we never have to plant them!  They continue to come up every year on their own and bless us with lots of good food.  Oh, before I forget.  I always put them in a tub and weigh them to see how many pounds we harvested.  This year, we harvested 121 pounds of sweet potatoes!  

Clearing the Sweet Potatoes Out to Make Room for the Fall Garden

We harvested a few sweet potatoes week before last, but this weekend I had a large task ahead of me.  With cooler weather and shorter days looming, it is time to get the fall garden in the ground - actually it is past time.  Before planting the fall garden, I first had to harvest all of the sweet potatoes.  The vines had consumed 1/4 of the enter garden space, leaving no room to pull up rows to plant carrots, beets, mustard, radishes, parsley, swiss chard and sugar snap peas.

Saturday morning I rolled out of bed earlier than normal, milked the cows, did the rest of the morning chores, and then got out the garden forks and began to turn over soil, unearthing sweet potatoes and bunches and bunches of earthworms.  The earthworms are proof to me that the garden soil is getting better and better each year.

You can see the lush sweet potato vines that cover the garden.  In the photo below, you can also see the garden forks that I use to turn the soil over in harvesting the sweet potatoes.

As I worked further southward, my bucket of sweet potatoes began to slowly fill with Beauregard Sweet Potatoes.

At night, the sweet potato flowers close.  In the morning, their flowers slowly begin opening.

Soon their lavender flowers with a purple interior is wide open...

As I pulled the vines away from the ground, they exposed many sweet potatoes waiting to be dug up. 

Some sweet potatoes, as shown below, are almost entirely on the top of the ground, Others, like the photo above are only partially exposed.  Some are completely hidden and are only found when you turn the soil over.

Tricia comes out and digs with me and she sorts the sweet potatoes and grades them into different sized onion sacks based on size - Huge, Medium, and Small.  Ultra small will be fed to the cows.  Cows love eating sweet potatoes!  So do people!

The cows and goats and chickens love to eat the sweet potato vines that I toss over the fence.  First, they eat all the leaves off.  Then they begin chewing on the vines themselves.  By the end of the day, there is nothing left!  We like to joke that after eating all that, the milk is sweeter!

We hang the four onion sacks of graded out sweet potatoes in the garage from the "Garfish," our canoe.  They'll hang and cure for a month or so, and then we'll begin to eat them.

This weekend I was able to harvest all of the potatoes.  Now we have room to get the fall garden in!

The Greatest Invention of All Time

Yesterday's post was all about putting some hard work in to move a pile of dirt from where it was delivered to the garden which is located about 30 feet to the south and west.  It was hard work, but I kept at it until the pile disappeared.  I worked up a sweat.  Even though it was only around 80 degrees, my shirt was soaked and so were my pants.  I had the good sense to wear gloves, so I avoided blisters from shoveling.  I was exhausted when I was done.  I slept like a baby and woke up sore in my shoulders and back.

I had another ailment, though.  Walking back and forth with sweat soaked pants that rubbed continuously all day, left me chafed.  We always called it chapped growing up.  Whatever you call it, it is uncomfortable.  Where the wet clothes rub your legs, it irritates the skin, making it red and inflamed. It is painful to walk and probably looks quite funny from a bystander's perspective because the chafing makes you walk bowlegged.  To the victim of chafing or chapping, however, it is not funny at all.

I have memories of this affliction from my childhood and I posted about it in the Red Rice post from back in 2013.  I describe the chafing problem in that post briefly.  What I didn't get into was what we did to try and treat it.  My great-grandmother's remedy was to fill your pockets with the leaves of a China Berry tree to the inflamed area.  That didn't seem to do much good.  Nothing seemed to do much good.  It seemed as if you would just have to suffer through the discomfort every time you worked hard as there was no cure.  Or was there?

Back in elementary school, we learned about Eli Whitney inventing the cotton gin and interchangeable parts.  We also learned about how Samuel Colt invented the Colt Revolver, Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone and Thomas Edison and the light bulb.  All notable inventions to be sure.  But I'd like to nominate this product as the greatest invention of all time:

Gold Bond Medicated Powder - I only wish I had known about this back in my red rice pulling days

Gold Bond Medicated Powder.  Oh my goodness.  The cooling - the relief.   This product dates back to 1882 when some doctors from Rhode Island formulated it. Amazingly, in 1912 the formula was sold to Mr. John M. Chapman, who achieved great brand recognition and distribution, according to Wikipedia.  Hmmm.  Get it? Chap man?  Chapped man?  From this gentleman's name, it appears he may have had a genetic predisposition to being chapped, so no doubt this product was near and dear to his heart (or his chapped parts).

Okay, so this post may be sort of tongue-in-cheek, but it is a good product that gives great relief to hard-working dirt movers or red rice pullers everywhere.  For full-disclosure, Gold Bond Medicated Powder did not pay me a penny for this favorable review, unfortunately.