October 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest Begins

Each year October arrives.  College Football season is in full swing.  The first cool front blows in.  A few leaves start falling and you realize it is time to dig some sweet potatoes.  In springtime every year for the past 15 years or so, sweet potatoes pop up voluntarily (unplanted) and take over the garden.  Every year I say it, but it is so neat that this is one crop we never have to plant or tend to.  The vines gobble up 1/3 of the total square footage in the garden.  It looks like a jungle.  If you walk through it, you wouldn't think that there is so much going on beneath the surface of the soil.

I'm not gonna lie.  Digging sweet potatoes isn't an easy task.  You must get a shovel and turn over every square foot of soil, searching through and picking out the sweet potatoes you've unearthed.  The sweet potatoes ain't gonna dig themselves.  Let's get busy!

Beautiful sweet potatoes are just under the soil hiding.  We dig them out and toss them into buckets.

As soon as we dig them up and before weeds can overtake the garden, we're doing a new thing this year - we are putting a 6 inch layer of wood chip mulch over the dug up soil.  We'll talk more about this tomorrow or Thursday.  If you compare the first photo in this post with the one below, you can see that we are a little better than halfway through the harvest.  Wood chips line the harvested ground.

Here's where Tricia gets involved.  She's not real keen on digging, but she is a good "sweet potato sorter and grader."  She goes through all the harvested sweet potatoes so far and separates them by size.  We have a bunch more to sort/grade when I finish harvesting the other half of the sweet potato patch.

In the first bucket, we have the "bits and pieces."  These are the small roots that are just not worth it to peel and cook as they are too small.  Many of these get accidentally left in the soil and sprout up next year.  These we picked, however, get used by adding to our cow's feed.  Cows love sweet potatoes!

The next bucket contains the small sweet potatoes.  These will be peeled and cooked to make latkes, mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato hash browns and sweet potato pie or empanadas.

Then Tricia has graded out some large ones.  These will be baked in the oven, cut in half and put melted butter over them.  Yum!

And finally, there are the mutants.  These are ridiculously large.  They are definitely edible, but you have to watch them as some of them will be stringy or woody.

It is crazy how monstrous some of these are.  Look at Big Bertha, right here:

Nothing is wasted in this harvest.  I think the animals have October circled on their calendar.  They love it when we harvest, because the sweet potato vines get tossed over the fence and there is a fall feast going on!  From the 9 o'clock position in the photo below, there is Salt, Pepper, Rosie, Annie, and Clarabelle all eating the vines.  They'll eat and eat and eat until they can't eat anymore.

I'm hoping to finish up the harvest by the weekend.  We'll give an update soon.

Harvesting 1/3 of the 2016 Sweet Potato Crop

I checked the calendar and noticed that our sweet potatoes have been growing for about 4 and 1/2 months now.  Harvest data that I read said that you can begin harvesting anywhere between 4 and 5 months.  Russ was in from college and figured that the perfect weather this weekend made it an optimal time to get out to the garden and dig up some sweet potatoes.

As the photo below evidences, sweet potato vines have taken over the northernmost parts of the garden.  The only barren spot you can see is the area that was planted in peanuts prior to us digging those up last weekend.  This plot of sweet potatoes include an heirloom variety from Tennessee called "Golden Wonder" that Russ was able to get some seed potatoes and propagate.

Sweet Potato Vines

We generally pull back some vines and carefully insert a shovel into the softened soil and pry upward.  This unearths some nice sweet potatoes, but you must be careful or you'll cut them in half with your shovel.

Digging up sweet potatoes is kind of like digging for buried treasure.  You can't see what's underneath the soil and it is always exciting to pull up the sweet potatoes from beneath the surface.

We like to eat the sweet potatoes that we dig up, but the cows, goats, guineas, and chickens also get into the action, too.  We throw the sweet potato vines over the garden fence and the animals go crazy over them.  In no time flat they've reduced the succulent vines to nothing!

About a third of the way into the harvest, we stopped and made a judgement call. We postponed the harvest of the remainder of the sweet potatoes for another month or so.  I'll likely work up the area into a nice seedbed in the spot that is dug up in the photo below and plant some lettuce.

Intermission

So why did we take a break?  Were we tired?  Yes, but that's not the reason.  Sort of like the fisherman who pulls in a fish and then throws it back in the water to grow some more, we did the same with our sweet potatoes.

While we did get some nice looking sweet potatoes, as you can see, many of them could benefit from an extra month or two (or three) of growing.  They will keep just fine in the ground and we'll check back later.  Of course we'll allow these to cure for three weeks or so and then we'll bake them up or have some sweet potato fries while we wait for the others to mature.