(The First Part of) The 2022 Sweet Potato Harvest

It is about time that I get the last remaining items planted in the fall garden.  That would be carrots, radishes, turnips, mustard greens, and spinach.  But before I get those in the ground, I need some room.  As is always the case, the sweet potato crop is engulfing almost a quarter of the square footage of the garden.  In order to plant the remaining crops, I've got to harvest the sweet potatoes.  

We've discussed previously how dry it's been, so in anticipation of the harvest, I irrigated the sweet potatoes the night before to loosen up the soil, thinking that if I didn't, the ground would be rock-hard.  The crop includes both the Beauregard variety as well as an heirloom Golden Wonder variety.

To dig them up, I use some digging forks.  They work great.  The soil wasn't compacted at all.  In fact the four inches of mulch I had covered the soil with had all composted and added good organic matter.  Here is a nice Beauregard sweet potato.

Here is another and this is indicative of the average size of sweet potato that I was digging up.  They are okay for eating, but mainly for making sweet potato fries or mashed sweet potatoes.

I dug up about a third of the sweet potato patch and decided I'd plant carrots in the harvested area and allow the remaining sweet potatoes to grow for a few more weeks before I attempt to harvest again.

As is the case year after year, the cows line up at the garden fence to eat the sweet potato vines I toss over to them.  They finished them all off in no time at all.

Tricia came and joined me and we hand-sorted the sweet potatoes into four different buckets.  Once sorted, we'll hang them for curing.

These are the "cattle feed" sort.  They are the small, skinny roots that we will feed to the cows.  Cows absolutely LOVE eating sweet potatoes.  We'll supplement some of these into their feed each day once it gets colder and the grass has died.

The ones in this sort or Very Small.  We use these for juicing or for cutting in half and roasting in the oven.

The ones in this sort are the "bakers."  We'll bake these and slather with butter and eat as a side dish.

Finally, this sort includes the "monsters."  These are so big they oftentimes aren't edible as they become hard and stringy.

Last year we harvested 192 pounds of sweet potatoes.  We haven't weighed all these yet, but we will.  I'll keep track of the number so that when we harvest the remainder, we can add the numbers together for our records.

Hit And Run (Our Maker's Acres Edition)

Belle is our dog.  She's a good dog, no doubt.  Look at those eyes.  It's like she can do not wrong, right?

Wrong.  Having Belle is like owning a excavator or a backhoe, or a bulldozer that turns itself on by itself and digs up the property at will.  She's done this in the last few days:

What a mess!  That was after getting bored digging this.

She digs the holes and then we fill them.  She's recently dug up a bed full of lilies that encircled a pecan tree.  I don't know what we're going to do with her.  

But recently evidence of additional digging has been found that is not from Belle.  It appears to be damage from an armadillo.  Several weeks ago, Tricia and I ran around at night with a spot light and a rifle and killed an armadillo that was digging in the front yard.  But now another one?  It has dug some holes underneath the smoker and various other spots in the yard.  Not that we've ever been concerned with having a manicured lawn, but this is ridiculous between Belle and the armadillos.

Country living is great, but there's always another item to put on the to do list that probably most people don't have.  Anyhow, I made a mental note to add "Kill armadillo" on the to do list.  Friday morning started out like any other Friday morning.  I woke up, showered, poured coffee and headed out the door at 5:18 am.  I started the car and backed out of the garage, turned on the headlights, put the car in drive and began driving down the driveway.

That's when I spotted the perp.  There was a beady eyed armadillo about 10 yards in front of me on the driveway.  Like a madman, I gunned the motor and, with a wicked gleam in my eye, sped toward the armored villain.  I could hear the animal hit the underneath of my car, possibly the oil pan.  Then, I felt a pleasing "thwunck" noise as my back tire passed over the body of the offending animal.  Three hours later, I called Tricia to see if she could walk out in the yard and located the prey.  She found it!  I was successful in my hit & run event.

When I got home later, I was in charge of disposing of the remains.  Here is the flat dude right here.  His digging days are done.

An autopsy was not performed; I know how he died.  However, you can see those powerful claws he uses for digging.

I got a pitchfork and carried him across the road and pitched him into the middle of a field.  I didn't even give him a proper burial.  I will save my energy with the shovel for filling in the holes he dug.

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!

Digging Spuds Without My Buds

About five or so years ago, I worked up a potato bed in the side yard.  The first year it was hard work.  The ground was a compacted, hard, dense, hard-pan as it was a rice field at one time.  Over the years I've amended the soil with hay, leaves and other organic matter.  Now the soil is easy to turn with a shovel.

I planted seed potatoes on about a 30 foot length of row.  Three quarters of it was planted with LaSoda seed potatoes I purchased at our local feed store.  The remainder was small Pontiac seed potatoes leftover from the previous spring.  I've had success holding over potatoes for seed in the past, but not this year.  These spuds were duds.  Only the new LaSoda seed potatoes produced.  I really can't put my finger on why the old saved seed potatoes didn't produce this year.  I've had success in the past, but not this time. 

My sons were unavailable to help, so for the first time in many years, I dug up the potato crop by myself.  It was kind of lonely!  As our birds are beginning to leave the nest, I'd best get accustomed to that.  I got a shovel and began turning the soil over, exposing beautiful potatoes just beneath the soil.  I had mulched the potatoes with lots of hay to keep weeds at bay.  That hay mulch kept the soil moist underneath, so it was VERY easy to turn the soil over and expose the potatoes.  As I dug them up, I buried the hay.  This organic matter will enrich the soil for next year's crop.  In no time, I was done!

A plethora from the potato plot

When I was done, I had partially filled a big wagon with fresh potatoes of various sizes.  It was not as good of a crop as in years past, but it was still a good crop.  We'll enjoy them over the next several months and if the weather cooperates, I'll plant a fall potato crop in a couple of months.

The Potato Wagon

The potatoes were of all different sizes - no two the same.  That's the thing about potatoes.  The crop is underground and you never know how they'll turn out until the very end, when you unearth them and examine the fruits of your labors.  Here is a nice 'baker' - fat, heavy, the size of your palm and perfect for baking.

And here are a few of my favorites.  They are golf-ball sized.  I like to either cut these in half and oven-roast them with butter and rosemary or, even better, slice these little boogers in half and cook with some fresh harvested green beans and butter.  Lots and lots of butter.  Delicious!

We learned many years ago to never wash them until you are ready to cook them.  We store them indoors in milk crates, all dirty.  They'll last that way. 

When digging them up, inevitably you feel the soft crunch under your shovel and realize that in trying to unearth the "pomme de terre" (fruit or apple of the earth), you slice some in half.  These are not lost.  They won't be wasted.  We bring them in, wash them up, and immediately cook them.  These became delicious hash browns!

As I think about it, and at the risk of being melodramatic, I realize that raising potatoes are like life, specifically raising kids.  You "plant" them, painstakingly "fertilize" them, and watch them grow, watering them as needed and pulling "weeds" that compete against them for nutrients.  Over the course of time you wonder if the seeds you planted will produce - if they will prosper and multiply.  You do your best, wondering, will they reproduce and produce a plentiful harvest?  While you watch them grow, most of the fruits of your labors are hidden underground.  You must be patient.  By and by, your "crop" is unearthed and you can begin to examine the fruit you tried so hard to produce. Raising your crop takes patience, love, care, devotion, and watchfulness.  You pray that you won't experience crop failure, hoping that your crop will be a success.  Will the potatoes you put in the ground produce more potatoes to carry forward seed for the future?  Only time will tell...

How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young? Paul Sweeney

As Slow as Molasses

I haven't looked at rainfall totals for the year yet, so it is too early to draw any conclusions, but I can tell you this: We had a VERY wet September.  October is usually our driest month of the year, but not this year.  It seems the ground will never dry up!  It has really delayed me from getting in the garden, working up the soil and getting the fall crops planted.  Comparing with previous years, at this time the crops are already growing nicely.  Not this year!  They aren't even in the ground!  My garden progress is moving slower than molasses in the wintertime.

Image Credit

As the clock ticks and the days get shorter, I have fewer and fewer hours of daylight to get things done in the afternoon.  On about 20% of the garden, I have to dig sweet potatoes prior to pulling up rows and planting.  That has been priority 1.  Each afternoon when I get home, I've been pulling up sweet potato vines to feed to the cows and have been turning over the soil with a heavy garden fork and harvesting sweet potatoes.  I've been digging until I can't see any more.  I think I should be able to finish tomorrow night or Saturday morning. 

I'll post photos of the garden and the progress that gets done.  The weather is supposed to (finally) clear up and get nice this weekend.  I'm looking forward to getting everything done.  I'll take lots of photos and will have plenty (I hope) to talk about next week.

Did a Little Sweet Potato Diggin' on Sunday

Each year for as long as I can remember, sweet potatoes sprout up on their own in the spring.  My guess is that they were originally rooted from sweet potatoes that we composted.  Now each year when we dig them, we'll invariably miss some and they'll sprout up the following year.  It's kind of neat - a crop you never have to plant.

So each October I have a process in harvesting them.  It goes like this: I begin pulling on the heavy sweet potato vines that cover the ground, breaking them off or cutting them with a shovel.  I'll toss them over the garden fence where the cows are impatiently waiting.  They absolutely love sweet potato vines.  They'll first eat all of the leaves off of the vines.  Then they'll go back and eat the vines themselves.  We like to think that it makes their milk taste sweeter the next day, but it may just be a figment of our imagination.

Then I'll get a shovel or garden forks and begin turning over the soil.  This exposes the sweet potatoes and I'll gather them and put them in a bucket.  Sometimes the sweet potatoes are completely underground and you can't see them and you'll cut right through them with a shove.  But sometimes, like in the photo below, they're somewhat exposed, and you can carefully pry them up out of the ground.

It's kind of like digging for treasure!  With a little digging, some nice sweet potatoes can be exposed.

Any small roots, or those I've accidentally cut into, are saved in a bucket to feed the cows.  They like sweet potatoes more than I do.  The nice ones, however, are saved for us!

Here is a little perspective on the size of these sweet potatoes.  This is a nice-sized one.  To be honest, I like the medium-sized ones the best, as the giant ones tend to be a little "stringy."

It took no time to fill a 5 gallon bucket.  I have many more hours of sweet potato digging to do, however.  We have a cool front blowing through, so it will be nice sweet potato digging weather.

Tricia came out and kept me company while I dug some of them.  She'll be cooking all of the sweet potatoes.  It is truly farm to table and honestly, sweet potatoes are one of the easiest crops to grow.  The photos above all show Beauregard variety, but I also have some "Golden Wonder" heirloom variety that pop up each year.

I estimate that I have maybe four or five hours of digging up the rest of the sweet potatoes.  The cows will certainly be very happy to eat more vines.  I hung the sweet potatoes from the rafters in the garage in an onion sack, and they'll cure there for a couple of months.  Can't wait to eat 'em up!!

Big Boy Does Not Like the Dog Days of Summer

We never quite get acclimated to July and August in South Louisiana.  It is hot and humid and those are just the facts.  We deal with it as best we can, often asking each other, "When do you think the first cold front will blow through?"  While we can go inside in the nice air conditioning and sit under a fan to cool off, the animals don't have that luxury.  Big Boy, our Great Pyrenees dog, loathes the summer.  With his big furry coat, he is not exactly cut out for this climate.  Great Pyrenees dogs come from a mountainous region bordering Spain and France.  Needless to say, the climate is a bit different in our lowland, swampy locale.

Big boy, however, has ways of trying to stay cool that doesn't include air conditioners or fans.  He digs holes.  Did I say holes?  I meant to say craters.  Although he has plenty of shade in his hangout in 'the grove' underneath the trampoline, Big Boy still seeks cooler temps.  Where does he find it?  In the cool dirt, of course.  A freshly dug hole unearths soft dirt untouched by the summer sun and heat.  I know it is hot and don't really begrudge his excavations as I know it cools him off.  He's a dog.  A Hot Dog.

It's just that it s never just one hole.  You see, that dirt he lays in doesn't stay cool.  It warms up due to Big Boy's body heat and the ambient temperature.  This provokes him to dig another hole...  And another and another.  I've gotten to the point where I have placed cinder blocks, ladders, wagons and all sorts of items around the base of a tangerine tree so he doesn't dig around it, expose its roots, and kill it.  This eyesore of a random assortment of digging barriers I've laid out would get us kicked out of a subdivision, if we lived in one.

The constant digging has loosened dirt and this is causing erosion problems during big rains.  This has caused me to use cinder blocks to build a retaining wall to keep Big Boy's dirt from washing down the ditch during big rains.  This was a lot of work and I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't look over indignantly at Big Boy while installing the erosion-slowing wall.

I just wish Big Boy would listen to the wise words of Will Rogers, who once said,

"If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging."

Diggin' And Pickin'

Nope, I'm not talking about my nose.

This weekend I figured it would be a good time to dig up the rest of the sweet potatoes.  We started harvesting the sweet potatoes back in this post on October 10th but the sweet potatoes weren't big enough yet.  We decided to let them grow for a couple more months after digging up 1/3 of the sweet potato patch.

This weekend we tried digging them up again and our patience was rewarded by a nice crop of good looking sweet potatoes.  Some of them were from the Golden Wonder Heirloom Sweet Potatoes that we got from Tennessee that we described back in this post from March.  Some of them were from some sweet potatoes from LSU.  After a very wet growing season, the ground finally dried up and the sweet potatoes did quite well.

We aren't the only beneficiaries of a good sweet potato crop - the cows are too.  They position themselves on the eastern side of the garden fence and munch on the tender, sweet vines that we throw over the fence.  I'm telling you, these girls look forward to the sweet potato harvest each year almost more than we do.  They eat the leaves first and then they'll go back and chew on the vines.  Even the next morning they are still picking over the vines.  They will chew on their cud all night and we always joke that the milk tomorrow will be 'sweet potato flavored milk.'

When the last shovelful of dirt is turned over and the dirt picked through, we had a garden wagon full of nice-sized tubers.  If you look closely in the wagon below, you'll see that some of the sweet potatoes were cut in half by the shovel.  It is hared to see them and sometimes while digging, I slice right through a nice one.  That's okay - the cut ones get separated into a pile that we will eat first.

As far as the others, I hang them in onion sacks from the canoe that hangs from the ceiling of the garage.  I allow them to cure in the cool, dry weather for about a month and then I'll bring them inside.

From the front of the canoe, I had another sack of sweet potatoes.  I usually weight them just to keep records of the harvest, but I was too tired out from digging them up to go inside and bring out the bathroom scale.  I'll bring out a scale when I pull them down to weigh and record the final harvest weight.

We bake the sweet potatoes whole, we make sweet potato fries, and we boil and mash them.  But our favorite thing to do with them is to make sweet potato latkes. Do yourself a favor and make some.  We posted the recipe and showed how to make them way back in this post four years ago.

Even though when we dig up the soil and pick through it, we're never able to find every single sweet potato - much to our dismay.  Those sweet potatoes lay dormant in the spring and then the slips pop up out of the ground on their own - giving us yet another year of "free" sweet potatoes.

Harvesting Potatoes with my Boys

From the day we plant our seed potatoes (around mid February each year), we eagerly anticipate the day that we harvest them.  We watch them as they grow, noting when they bloom and then when the plant itself starts dying back, letting you know it is time to get the shovel and call the potato digging crew.  Harvesting potatoes is a fun job.  It is kind of like digging for buried treasure.  Since potatoes grow beneath the soil, you never know what you have until you put the shovel in the ground and turn the soil over.

The potato plants were the biggest and healthiest that they've ever been this year and I attribute that to the composted chicken litter that a friend gave me.  I incorporated that into the garden and it really grew some beautiful plants.  But as stated earlier, the success of a potato crop lies below the ground.  Let's see what we've got:

Pay dirt!!!

The first shovel unearthed a nice bounty of beautiful potatoes of all different shapes and sizes.  My job is to dig them and Russ and Benjamin are spotters.  As I turn the soil over, they look for potatoes and throw them into a crate.  These new potatoes are just the perfect size.  After just a few hills were dug, we knew that it was going to be a nice harvest.

Varied sizes of new potatoes

I planted mostly red potatoes, but also planted a few Yukon Gold potatoes for variety. The red potatoes proved to be the better producers this year as they have in previous years.  The soil was so rich and easy to turn over, thanks to the compost and organic matter.  With each passing year, you can see visible results that the soil is getting better and better.  This guy gives evidence to the health of the soil:

Earthworms & Healthy Soil

Here is a photo of the process, we me digging and Benjamin and Russ gathering the potatoes into a bucket. Crocs and socks aren't exactly fashionable, I know, but when you are digging potatoes, you really aren't trying to impress anyone!

You've got to be real careful not to cut the potatoes in half when you're digging.  I messed up on a few and we'll eat those right away.  Sometimes you have to turn the soil over several times to make sure that you don't leave any potatoes in the ground. If you do, it is not a real big deal.  The potatoes left in the ground will re-sprout and grow new potatoes for you.

Digging as much as we can before the sun goes down

Tricia took a picture of us when we were done for the afternoon.  In all we had to break up the harvest into 3 separate days as the daylight ran out on us each afternoon after work.  Even ol' Big Boy came and joined us for the picture.

The Potato Harvesters

There was no Potato Famine at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm this year.  Our harvest was bountiful, thank the Good Lord!  In fact last night I posted about our harvest of Italian Roma Beans and I mentioned that we'd couple those beans with some of our harvest from the blog post tonight with what might be the world's most perfect side dish.  And here it is - Italian Roma Green Beans steamed in butter with fresh-dug new potatoes!

Talk about good!

Rice & Gravy with smothered steak and fresh green beans and side of new potatoes is a meal fit for a king, I tell ya!

Mmmmmm!

At the end of the day, we had a good time uncovering some nice potatoes from 4 1/2 rows.  The boys enjoy harvesting them and so do I.  Now the potato patch looks so barren, so empty, and it is, but I'll add some composted chicken litter that I just removed from beneath the roosts in the chicken coop and we'll plant some more beans in this very spot.  It won't be barren for long.

Ready for a new crop to be sown...

Tomorrow I'll show you our entire harvest of potatoes.  Well, at least those that we haven't devoured yet. We learned last year that if you don't wash the potatoes and you store them in a dark place in a crate like a milk crate that allows for air flow, potatoes will last for a long, long time.