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!

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!

Curing The Crop

Once the harvest is over, we begin sorting out the sweet potatoes.  Unlike the ones you find in the produce section of your store, there is a wide variety of sizes of sweet potatoes you unearth from the garden.  We like to sort them out and grade them into several categories.  We lay out buckets for the sorting job and then get after it.  We'll take all the HUGE sweet potatoes and put them in one container.  These big ones run the risk of being too stringy or woody to eat.  If we find this is the case, they become chicken feed.

The easiest to sort are the sweet potatoes that are really too small for human consumption.  Or maybe those that got cut in half during harvest.  These go into the bin that will be used as feed for our cattle.  Cows love the sweet potato vines and leaves, and they also love the crunchy sweetness of these.  We will toss a few in their feed buckets and they enjoy them.

The next sort are those that are too big for cattle feed, but are too small for baking.  We'll generally use these for making latkes or oven baked sweet potato fries.

The next sort are those that are pretty much perfect in size.  These will be baked and cut open so that pats of butter can be inserted into the steaming interior.  Delish!

Fortunately, we have a lot of sweet potatoes that are this size.

But it is not wise to bring them in to eat just yet.  First you must cure the sweet potatoes to get the maximum flavor out of your harvest.  Curing is done so that changes occur within the sweet potato in which starches are converted to sugar.  It takes four to eight weeks of hanging.  We generally do this in our garage.  We use typical onion sacks to provide air flow.  During this time, cuts from the harvest caused by shovel nicks heal up.

Coincidentally, these sweet potatoes ought to be at their best flavor around Thanksgiving time!

We have a lot to be thankful for this year!

Onion Harvesting 2020

Our onions that we planted back on January 19th are ripening.  Over the next couple of weeks we will completely harvest all of them as they are ready.  The onion below is still growing.  You can tell because the tops are standing straight up:

When the neck becomes soft and the tops fall to the side like below, you know they are ripe and ready for pulling.

I gently pull them up and lay them on the side of the row.

I got a length of hurricane fence and stretched it out and placed the onions on top with the greens hanging beneath to dry.  This was working well, allowing good air flow, until we got a big thunderstorm that rolled through.  Tricia and I ran out in the pouring down rain and brought all of the onions under the patio.  It was a good plan while the weather held out, but you want to keep your onions dry once you harvest and cure them or they won't hold up.  They'll get soft and mildew and rot.

We cut the tops off the onions, leaving about an inch and a half of the neck and then cut off the roots.  We placed them on a shelf with open wire racks and then positioned a fan underneath to constantly blow air over the onions.  This apparatus is set up under the patio and should dry them.

I would estimate about half of the onions are drying like this now.  We're hoping we're successful in curing and storing the onions.  With our high humidity in South Louisiana, it is hard to cure onions and garlic without them getting soft and going bad.  Our garlic will be ready for harvest soon and we'll use the same process in curing them as well. 

2019 Sweet Potato Harvest By the Numbers

One last post on the 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest.  Here's how the sweet potato patch looked prior to digging them up:

Before

And here is an "after" shot once all the sweet potatoes were dug up, vines were tossed to the animals to eat, and a 4 inch layer of wood chips was spread on the soil to cover:

After

Quite a change, huh? As discussed in a previous post, we separated them out into different containers, grading them in four categories:

• Small roots and Pieces (to feed the cows),
• Small
• Medium
• Large Monster Sweet Potatoes (took two buckets to hold 'em)

I placed each container on our bathroom scale in order to see how many pounds of sweet potatoes were produced this year.  We always like to keep good records to see how things stacked up year over year.

And here is the final tally after all of them were weighed:

The large sweet potatoes weighed a total of 50 pounds.  The mediums weighed a total of 74 pounds.  The small weighed a total of 68 pounds and the bits and pieces weighed 34 pounds.  The grand total of the sweet potato harvest was 226 pounds.  Let's subtract out the small ones we'll feed to the cows.  We harvested 192 pounds of sweet potatoes for us to consume.  That surpassed our previous record harvest of 186 pounds back in 2017.

I bagged them up in onion sacks and hung them from the ceiling in the garage.  This allows good air flow.  It is best to allow sweet potatoes to cure for a minimum of 3 weeks to allow the starch to convert to sugar.  This makes for a better tasting sweet potato.

We look forward to eating a bunch of sweet potatoes over the next year.  The first ones will be cured and ready around Thanksgiving.  Perfect!

Harvesting Onions - 2017

We harvested some onions today.  As you can see in the center of the photo below there are onions in the center that are being taken over by sweet potato vines.  As the sweet potatoes are taking over the onion patch, it is okay, because the onions have signaled that they are ready to be harvested.

The way you know that it is time to harvest onions is that the tops of the onions will droop over.  As if to say, "I'm tired.  Pull me up."  So I oblige.  This is an indication that the onion's life cycle is nearing its end and no more energy will be devoted to growing the bulb.  About 20% of the onions had not fallen over, so I'm leaving them to grow for a while longer.  I'll keep my eye on them and will pull them as soon as they fall.  I want to give them a chance to grow to their full potential.

I began pulling onions and have to say that this year's crop is far better than last year's crop.  Most of the onions were larger, and although some were small, on average they were a nice size.  This is a Texas 1015 Sweet Onion I"m holding in my hand.

And this beauty right here is a Red Creole Onion.

I filled up our garden wagon with fresh-pulled onions and pulled them into the garage.

The wind was really blowing outside and it was perfect weather to start the onions drying/curing.  I want to maximize the air flow around the onions, so I got some old boards I salvaged from a chicken tractor that I'm in the process of demolishing, some roofing nails, and some hardware cloth, and I quickly constructed a drying rack and began to lay the onions on top.

Before long I had the drying rack built and all the 2017 onion harvest spread out to begin the drying process.  The onions smelled great and I can't wait to try them! But first we have to let them dry so that they will store.

After a day and a half, I got some clippers and clipped off the roots of each onion and then clipped off the onion tops, leaving about 3/4 of an inch of the onion tops.

I'll watch them closely while they dry as a sudden spike in humidity or rain could cause them to begin to get soft and rot.  If that starts to happen, I'll chop them up and freeze them.  I wasn't as prudent as I should have been during this same process a couple of years ago curing garlic and a lot of the garlic rotted.  I'll not make that mistake again.

In a couple of weeks the outer skin of the onions will dry and become like paper, as will the onion top itself.  At that point they'll be shelf-stable for a while and I'll put them in an onion sack and bring them inside.  I love to eat onions and can't wait to give these a try.  We'll definitely order these again next year.  If you are interested, I give two thumbs up to Dixondale Farms.  That's where I ordered my onion sets from.  You can learn more about Dixondale Farms by clicking HERE>

Getting Ready to Plant Potatoes

If the weather cooperates, I usually try to plant potatoes around Valentine's Day.  I asked Tricia to keep her watchful eye for when Seed Potatoes arrive at the Feed Store for sale.  Sure enough, she showed up with a box of seed potatoes - both red and white ones.

We had a nice crop of potatoes last year and we've been successful in storing them for months with little to no spoilage, simply by not washing them after harvest and putting them in stacked milk crates that allow good airflow, and then storing them in a cool, dark place.  This just happens to be a little closet we call the 'mud room.' We keep the door shut and there is an air conditioning vent that keeps it nice and cool.

In a decision that may prove to be in error, I asked her to go back and get some more seed potatoes. I put them on the scale and we have a hair over 11 pounds of seed potatoes.  Although I can't remember, last year I think we planted between 3 and 6 pounds of Pomme de Terre (Apples of the Earth)!  I assure you, if we plant too many this year, they won't go to waste.

Seed Potatoes from Parsley's Feed Store in Jennings

Last year we were able to save some potatoes that we harvested from our Spring potato crop to use as seed potatoes in planting our inaugural Fall potato crop.  I learned that we planted a little bit late. For 2015, I'll get them in the ground sooner.

Now you can see that the seed potatoes have some nice, healthy eyes growing.  Each eye will grow its own potato plant.  Although you can plant an entire potato, I think it's best to cut them up and that was my task night before last.

The Eyes of the Potato

All you need is a sharp knife and a watchful eye.  The goal of this endeavor is to cut the potato up so that each chunk of potato has an eye on it.  Depending on the size of the spud and the number of eyes on it, I'll cut them into as few as two pieces or as many as four.  The trick is, you don't want to cut the eye itself, so when you slice the potato, you spin it around the backside to ensure you aren't cutting one.  You also want the chunks to be of a good size as the growing potato plant uses the potato itself as 'food' to grow on.  Cutting it too small would mean the young plant wouldn't have enough nutrition to grow well.

I cut this one in two pieces.  Can you spot the eyes on each side?  Each piece of potato below will develop it's own distinct plant, yielding a nice bounty of delicious new potatoes that we'll enjoy cooked with butter and fresh picked green beans in about 3 and a half months.  <Stomach growls at the thought of this event>

The Eyes have it

You don't want to immediately go and put the cut up seed potatoes in the ground. That would result in some of them rotting.  After cutting them up, I'll leave them in a box and stir them gently for about a week or until the cut pieces develop a 'scab.' That simply means the fresh cut has healed and dried. I counted them up and once I finished, I had 117 individual potato chunks to plant!  Not all of them will grow, but the majority will, and that is a lot of potatoes.  I'll normally dig up young potato plants and replant them in the gaps in the row where the seed potatoes didn't sprout to ensure I have an efficient use of garden area.

Curing, cut-up Seed Potatoes

I'll watch these closely until the perfect day arrives to plant them.  According to the 2015 Farmer's Almanac, on February 14 - 15, it says "Any root crops that can be planted now will do well." Looking at the box of cut up potatoes naturally makes me a little hungry.  I could just as easily take the box inside, slice them up, and eat them.  But that's a little lesson in delayed gratification you learn in gardening (and life): Hopefully, by foregoing satisfaction and enjoyment now, you'll experience an eight to tenfold reward in the future at harvest time.  We DID see that last year.  I wish I could say the same about my investments over the years...  Oh well.

Now we just wait and see if we have good planting weather on the 14th or 15th.

Curing/Drying Our Peanut Harvest

We talked about harvesting our first ever peanut crop in This Post.  Once Benjamin and I harvested our peanut crop, we did pop a couple out of the shell and eat them, but to really do them right, you gotta dry them.  I brought them in the garage and ran a rope from one end of our canoe to the other and hung the entire peanut plant with peanuts facing up, from the rope.  We allowed them to dry for about 3 weeks. You could tell that they were ready because the leaves of the plant got dry and crumbly.

Drying the Peanuts

I popped the peanuts off of the peg (or shoot) that the peanut grew on.  As we explained in the blog post about the harvest, we waited much too long to harvest our peanuts and a bunch of them sprouted in the shell and we lost them.  But we still have enough to eat.  Here is a handful of the freshly dried peanuts.

"Give me some peanuts and cracker jacks..."

All in all we only had 6 peanut plants, so our peanut harvest was very skimpy.  Any knowledgeable peanut farmer would laugh at our little bucket of peanuts, but this was a first for us and we're definitely going to try it again.

The entire peanut harvest

Once I ensured that there were no more peanuts clinging to the plant, I piled what remained up and brought the plants out to the compost pile.

Off to the compost pile

So our big dilemma was what to do with our peanuts?  Roast them? Boil them? Make homemade peanut butter?  Or save them for seed to replant peanuts this Spring?  We haven't made up our minds yet, but we'll definitely show you whatever we decide to do with them.  My vote is to make peanut butter.

Harvesting Garlic

Immediately following our 5 inch rain the other day, I started pulling up the garlic that I have planted on a wide row.  They were ready to be pulled as the bottom leaves had started to die back and with all of the rain, I certainly didn't want them rotting in the ground.  I planted about 100 cloves back in October of 2013 and mulched them heavily to discourage weed growth.  Here is a shot of a water-logged row of garlic after I had pulled 1/3 of them up.

After I pull them, I lay them in the hay on the row to let the sun dry them out somewhat.  I space them out a little so that the air can move around them and begin the drying process.

Beginning the drying process

The next day I roll them all over so that the other side can begin drying as well.  The skins of the garlic on the sunny side are already feeling 'papery' and that is a good sign that the sun is doing its job.

Flipped them over

I've read that you don't want to leave them out in the sun long as the garlic will get sunburned.  This is by far our best year for garlic production, with most of the bulbs being plump with many cloves in them.  Last year many of them only made garlic 'onions' that never separated.  They tasted fine, but weren't the traditional looking garlic.

Nice sized garlic

For my first batch, I brought in 45 heads of garlic.  It was too hot and humid to leave them outside.

In some locales, you can braid them and hang them to dry outside.  Not here.  I've learned from experience that it is far to humid to do that in South Louisiana.  In years past, I lost most of the garlic I harvested as it simply got soft and rotted after I harvested them.  Not good.

For this first batch, I cut off the tops and put them in our food warmer to speed up the drying process.  Here they are drying.  We also started eating some right away.

While this process works to dry them somewhat, many of these got soft and Tricia had to open them up and separate the cloves to salvage them and dry them.

The better option, and the one we had better success with was to bring them in and leave all the leaves on and let them cure inside.  We still check them and some did get a little soft, but for the most part they are curing nicely.  I'll just leave them there for a couple of months drying and we'll use them as we need them.

Last year I laid a box fan on its side where it was blowing air upward and laid the bulbs on top where the airflow would dry them.  I left it like this for a couple of weeks.  I think this would work in other climates to dry the garlic, but not here.  I was essentially blowing hot, wet air over the garlic and it never dried.  I ended up losing a good number of them.  I'm thinking that I should have left them outside with the fan blowing for a couple of months.  Perhaps I didn't dry them long enough with the fan blowing.  For the time being, inside is the better option for drying garlic, but I'll continue to try to learn new techniques for drying as we LOVE garlic!

Making Basic Cheese (Part 3 Sealing and Aging)

Welcome to Part 3 of Making Basic Cheese.  Have you ever opened a package of store bought cheese and then placed it back in the refrigerator without sealing it properly?  When you go back to use it, you see that the outer exposed edges of the cheese is darker, hard, dried out, and thus, inedible.  To eat it you must cut off the hard part.

The next step we do in order to age the cheese we've made is to place a coating of wax over it to protect it during the aging process so that the cheese doesn't dry out.  If you have ever eaten those little babybel snack cheeses that are wrapped in wax, you know what I'm talking about.  So we've purchased a block of cheese wax from a cheesemaking supply website and now we've got to melt it.  We do this by placing the whole block of wax into a double boiler.

Melting the cheese wax in a double boiler

The object of our process is to fully encase the beautiful wheel of cheese below in wax to protect it from drying out during the curing process which takes several months. Prior to waxing, you want to leave the cheese in the fridge for a few days wrapped loosely in a cotton rag to allow for any additional whey to come out.  You want to turn it to make sure it air dries and it makes a rind on the outside.  Put it on a rack to allow the air to circulate around it fully.

A hanker for a hunk of cheese...

Our block of wax is now fully melted in our double boiler.  We're using the liner to an old rice cooker that doesn't work anymore to hold the wax.  We don't throw too much away at our house.  Items that no longer work get recycled into a second purpose other than what it was originally intended for.  Gallon jugs of apple cider vinegar get cut to become feed scoops, etc. etc.  Back to our wax, though, we're ready to coat the cheese.  

Melted Cheese wax

There is nothing too technical about this next step.  Simply dip the cheese halfway into the wax, ensuring that wax has gotten into any nooks and crannies.  Dip it, wait 10 seconds and then dip a second time.

Dipping the cheese

Sit this on a sheet of wax paper on the counter and allow to fully dry.  It doesn't take too long.

Drying the wax

Now, grab the cheese holding it by the side that you've already waxed and dip the unwaxed section into the wax so that it is fully coated.

Fully sealed

We're done!  While the wax is still wet, make a little label with the date and variety of cheese and push it into the wet wax.  This is important as it will let you know the date you began the curing process, so you know when it is done.  If you're making different types of cheeses, it will let you know which variety it is as well. Here's the neat thing about the wax - when you cut it open, you save the wax, re-melt and re-use it.

Sealed and Labeled 2 Pound wheel of Our Maker's Acres Homemade Basic Cheese

Now, for the curing process, we place it in the wine cooler.  This is a nifty new purchase.  This appliance costs $500 new which is outside of our budget, but Tricia was able to find this on Craigslist for $75!!  It has 2 separate, dual digitally controlled sections so that you can cure/age different types of cheeses.  The wooden racks and glass front door are nice features as well.  You can see that we have two other wheels of cheese that we'll be waxing today.

Wine cooler cheese ager

Take a close look at the object in the picture below and see if you can guess what it is.  (Answer Below)

Beeswax

It's beeswax.  We have a friend that is a beekeeper and he gave us a couple of pounds of beeswax from his colonies of bees after we asked him for some of it.  We'll trade him some cheese for it.  Instead of purchasing wax for sealing our cheese, we'll barter for it.  That fits in nicely with what we're trying to do in being as self-sufficient as possible and then bartering for items that we don't have.  Our friend doesn't want to milk cows and we don't like being stung by bees!

There once was a woman named Tricia,

Who made a bunch of cheese,

But when she ran out of wax for sealing,

She used some made by bees.  (Oh please!)

So here we are melting the beeswax in a double boiler, using the same process.

Melting the beeswax in a double boiler

Since the beeswax came directly from the hive, there is going to be some impurities in it.  I blew it off real good with an air compressor, but there are still a few specks that I can't remove.

Beeswax is fully melted

As a result, we pour the beeswax through a strainer to catch the remaining impurities.

Straining out flecks of residue

Now we have a container of beautiful, strained beeswax that is ready to seal another wheel of cheese.

None of your beeswax

Here is the finished product.  A beautiful wheel of beeswax sealed cheese ready to be aged!

Ain't that a pretty sight

Tune in tomorrow for the final installment of our Cheesemaking exhibition.  I think it is the best part since it involves tasting it!