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!

Putting the finishing touches on the 2014 Potato Harvest

It took us three afternoons to dig up all of our potatoes.  It was hard, but rewarding work.  We learned a few years ago that potatoes will last for a long time if you DON'T wash them.  So we brought them inside and weighed them.  We were amazed to see that our total harvest on 4 1/2 rows  weighed in at a whopping 107 pounds!

2014 Potato Harvest

So the next thing that we did was put them into milk crate type storage containers so that there is plenty of air flow.  We'll put them into a dark pantry and pull them out as we need them.  To give a little perspective, Russ (who is 5' 9") laid down by the harvest baskets.

We went through all 107 pounds of potatoes, sorting them out by sizes.  I'm sure there is some tool that does this mechanically, but we just do it by hand.  In the first container we put all the really small potatoes, including those from the size of a marble to the size of a large olive.  We'll eat these first.

Extra small potatoes

The next size sort are those that I call "Crawfish Potatoes," since these are the size potatoes you often see used in crawfish boils.  These potatoes are about the size of a ping pong ball.  These are a nice size for cooking with fresh green beans.

"Crawfish Potatoes"

The next size that we sorted were the medium sized potatoes that ranged from the size of a golf ball to the size of a tennis ball.  We like to take these size potatoes and cut them in half.  We then toss them in butter and fresh rosemary and then roast them in the oven.

Medium Potatoes

Finally we have the large potatoes that included anything larger than a tennis ball. These we'll shred up for making hash browns or use to make potato salad or other baking needs.

Large potatoes

And that closes out the 2014 Potato crop.  We generally try to plant them each year on February 14th. We'll make these last as long as we can.

SPUDS!

We'll also save some of them to use as seed potatoes for next year.  The half row of potatoes this year included seed potatoes that we saved from the previous year.  That was the first year that we've been successful in saving seed potatoes, so that was a positive.  SPUDS!  I was wondering how potatoes came to be known as spuds and in THIS LINK I learned that a spud was a sharp-bladed tool used to dig up potatoes and people nicknamed the potato after the implement used to dig it.  The nickname caught for some strange reason.  Regardless if you call them spuds or potatoes, they make a nice meal!