Trying a New Variety

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that for the last 20 years we have sweet potatoes that come up volunteer each and every year.  We never have to plant them and yet receive a nice harvest every fall.  It all started from composting one Beauregard Sweet Potato.  That one sweet potato expanded and multiplied.  To that, we added an heirloom variety called Golden Wonder, that we picked up from a guy called "The Barefoot Gardener" in Tennessee.  The Golden Wonders were prolific, producing a nice tasting sweet potato, but not as rich of a color and flavor as the Beauregard.  To add insult to injury, the Golden Wonder's crowded out the Beauregards.

Just to the east and north of us in a community between Evangeline and Iota is a farming family named Garber.  Everyone else around here grows rice.  They grow sweet potatoes.  I picked up a box of a variety they grow called Evangeline from our local feed store.  Admittedly, I purchased them to eat.  We made sweet potato fries, and I'll vouch for the flavor.  Yum!  But the other reason I bought the box was to attempt to get a local variety growing in our garden again.

No matter how thorough you are when digging sweet potatoes, you always miss a root.  From that root comes new sweet potato plants.  Here is a Golden Wonder growing up this spring.  My idea this year is to pull up 2/3's of these to allow room for the Evangeline's to get a foothold.

I picked out eight sweet potatoes from the box that were on the smaller side - we want to eat the big ones!  I also picked the ones that had "slips" or sprouts growing out from one end.

This sprout will grow out a vine.  Now you can put the sweet potato in water and the slips will grow out.  You can then clip them and they'll develop roots and grow.  I think I'm just going to plant the potato whole.  That's what we did with the Beauregard a long time ago and it grew without planting individual slips.  We'll see if this works.

I dug a shallow hole in the north part of the garden and planted the potatoes with the sprouts sticking up.

I watered them in and marked where I planted them with blue flags.

I'll keep a close eye on them.  We will hopefully experience a good growth of the Evangeline variety of sweet potato in our garden, allowing them to establish themselves so we can enjoy them year after year.

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!

The Latest Harvest Ever

Of sweet potatoes, that is.  Normally, we are harvesting sweet potatoes in October to make room for fall garden planting.  This year was different.  The drought had curtailed the normal sweet potato vine growth.  Normally, the vines would have grown by leaps and bounds, filling a full quarter of the garden acreage.  With the lack of rainfall, the vines were puny.  The watering I did every day with a water hose was a poor substitute for God's rainfall.  It kept them alive, but they didn't thrive.

We decided to go ahead and let the sweet potatoes continue to grow as much as possible, until the vines were hurt by a frost.  We like to get a double harvest - one for us and one for the animals.  We eat the sweet potatoes and the animals get to devour the vines.  It's a win-win situation!  Here it is January.  We've had a few frosts that has burned the vines.  I figured it was time to start harvesting.  Hopefully, the extra two months will have given time for sweet potato growth.  We're about to find out.  

Here are the vines.  Normally, they are lush and fill the space.  But we'll see.  It's what's BELOW the ground that counts.

The trick is that I don't want to turn over more soil than I have to.  I use pruning shears to cut the vines back to where they go in the ground.  Then I get my digging forks and gently dig in that area only.  If you are real careful, you can dig up some nice ones.  

If you're not real careful, you end up cutting into the sweet potatoes with the forks.  In my little harvest, I have a process.  The big ones get tossed into a bucket.  The small ones get tossed into another bucket.  The big ones will be cured and eaten.  The small ones will be fed to the cows.  Those girls just love sweet potatoes.  You can hear the crunching of the sweet potatoes in their mouths.

I finished the harvest this afternoon.  We harvested about 70 pounds of sweet potatoes.  Normally, we get a little better than 100 pounds.  The yield is down, but that was expected.  The sweet potatoes were placed into two crawfish (or onion) sacks.  Those two sacks were hung from the canoe to cure.

We will allow them to hang in the garage and cure for a couple of months.  Doing this allows the skins to toughen up and most importantly, the sugars to get sweeter.

We'll wait for the rest of them to cure, but I'll admit, we cooked two of them in a Coconut Curry Sweet potato soup.  Delicious!  In the next few weeks the 2024 sweet potato crop should start growing.  How does this happen?  On its own.  We always miss some of the tubers in the ground.  Those sprout and grow for us next year's crop.  It's happened like that every year for the last decade or so.  It's the gift that keeps on giving.

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!  

Random Photos and Thoughts

First things first.  I fixed the link on the Independence Day post from yesterday.  If you were unable to open it, I added a hyperlink that you can click on to view the video.  It is from Paul Harvey and it's very interesting.

Now, today's post is a little different.  I'll show a few photos and explain what's going on.  Normally, posts are topic-driven, but tonight is an outlier.  As the cucumber crop comes to a screeching halt with the high heat, we've been eating the harvested cukes in the vegetable crisper.  Most are eaten raw with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sea salt and pepper, but Tricia did make a jar of lacto-fermented pickles.  It's simply cut up cucumbers pickled in whey.

Our pecan trees haven't made pecans in a couple of years.  I don't know if they are missing some nutrient or fertility or if the darned squirrels are just eating them all.  I do see little pecans in the trees.  Maybe we'll get some this year!  I will try to keep my eyes open for the squirrels, though.  It may turn out that I'll have to harvest a bunch of squirrels if I want to harvest a bunch of pecans.

Tricia made tacos the other night with homemade corn tortillas and sautéed garden squash on the side.  The squash weren't actually from our garden.  Our squash gave up the ghost after all the rain last month.  The tacos and squash were delicious! 

These weren't just any tacos.  They were lengua tacos - Beef Tongue from our bulls we had slaughtered.  They were very good.  They are tender and tasty.   

The eggplant are ready for picking.  We like to eat them fried and also make caponata with them.  They are pretty and purple. 

Finally, here is a Beauregard Sweet Potato in bloom.  You can't see anything above ground except for a lot of vines, but underground is where the work is getting done.  Sweet potato tubers are growing and they'll be ready for harvest this fall.

Just a few random photos tonight.  I hope all is well with your family.

A Springtime Stroll

This post will be short on commentary.  I'll let the photos speak for themselves for the most part.  Spring is very, very short in South Louisiana.  It changes from cold (cold for us, anyway), too cool (for a brief time), to hitting 80 degrees by 8 a.m. in just a few weeks.  We enjoy it while we can.  The April showers do indeed, bring May flowers.

Here you can see a bloom that is about to unfurl...

Here is that flower in all it's glory - the Louisiana Iris.  I love the colors!

They bloom like crazy for a while, but the greenery remains.  About 19 years ago, I spotted a clump of these growing in a ditch at the farm across from the big irrigation well.  I got my shovel and dug a sampling of the irises and planted them in a low spot in our yard where the rainwater generally keeps the soil moist.  The Louisiana Iris has thrived in this spot and has multiplied.

This amaryllis is happy and sports four large, red flowers.  We have these planted in some beds around the house, but this one always looks so nice in the terra cotta pot.

A close-up:

This bright pink azalea is one that came from my grandmother's house in Kinder, where Tricia and I lived.  We have it planted up by the road in front.  It is so happy in this location.  It blooms and blooms and blooms.  We've taken many pictures in front of it over the years and it reminds me of my grandmother.

A close-up:

Pretty in Pink

As I always say, flowers are nice to look at, but I like growing things to eat, so I'll leave you with this.  I mentioned to Tricia that I was concerned that our sweet potato harvest was too thorough this year.  I was worried we weren't going to have any sweet potatoes this year.

You see, many years ago, we composted a sweet potato in the garden after a meal, and a sweet potato vine grew and produced.  The same thing the next year.  And the next.  We have never planted any sweet potatoes in the garden since that initial, accidental planting, and each each we harvest a bunch of nice sweet potatoes.  I'm not exaggerating when I say that over the past ten years, we've probably harvested almost 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes.

The original variety was the Beauregard, but since then, we've added some experimental varieties being grown by LSU as well as an Heirloom variety from Tennessee called the "Golden Wonder."  The harvest of sweet potatoes the following year is contingent upon not harvesting them all.  If you leave a piece of a sweet potato root in the ground, it will inevitably grow the next spring.  Well, I've not seen any sweet potato vines growing.  Until the other day!  Here is a healthy "slip" right here:

Since I saw this one, at least 7 others have popped up.  By mid summer, a quarter of the garden will be covered in these vines.  We will once again have a nice sweet potato harvest this fall if the Good Lord's willing.

I Yam What I Yam

Image Credit

There's a gentleman and his family that we go to church with and they pickle quail eggs in pint-sized jars.  Growing up, when you'd go into a local convenience store, these were always placed predominantly by the checkout counter - jars of beautiful little quail eggs swimming in a highly seasoned brine.  Oftentimes there was a gallon sized jar next to it with pickled pigs feet!  The pigs feet were not very appetizing to me, no sir.  Not at all.

Back to the pickled quail eggs...  So the gentleman from our church asked me if I might have some extra jalapeno peppers that I could sell him to season some of his quail eggs EXTRA HOT.  I have two varieties - one variety is hot, while the other is milder but large.  Those are great for stuffing with cream cheese and chorizo when we make poppers.  Anyway, I told him that I didn't have any to sell him, but I had a lot to give him.  He lives right down the road and when Tricia was in the hospital, he came by and fed the animals.

So Sunday after church I walked out and picked a produce bag full of peppers for him.  The walkway between the peppers had been overgrown with sweet potato vines that I had recently clipped and thrown over the fence for the cows to eat.  There is nothing they like as much as sweet potato vines!  While I was picking jalapenos, I saw a nice-sized sweet potato in the walkway.  I left it there for a few days until Tricia pointed it out and I pulled it. 

Isn't she a beaut!  That is about as perfect of a Beauregard Sweet Potato as I've ever picked from the garden - growing right in the walkway!  Our sweet potatoes never have to be planted.  They come up on their own each year (like weeds do).  One time probably 10 years ago, we composted some scraps and a sweet potato grew and each year since then, we can count on sweet potato slips popping up out of the ground in the early spring.

I have planted another heirloom sweet potato cultivar called "Golden Wonder" a couple of years ago and now those come up volunteer as well.  Usually in October when the first signs of fall appear, we'll dig up the sweet potatoes and cure them in onion sacks hanging from our garage.  If the vines are any indication of a successful crop, we are going to have a bumper crop of sweet potatoes like we've never seen.  I'm telling you the vines are thick and lush and beautiful.  I've caught the cows coveting the sweet potato vines.  I think I actually saw them marking off the days on a calendar until October as they know they will get a gargantuan amount of sweet potato vines to eat.  We always joke that the next day, the milk will be extra sweet from the sweet potatoes.  We'll be sure to post about the sweet 2017 potato harvest.

Drying Sweet Potatoes

We are approaching the end of our inventory of sweet potatoes that we harvested back in the fall. There's only a portion of a milk crate left.  Naturally, the biggest ones get eaten first as they are easier to peel.  We like to roast them, make mashed sweet potatoes, make sweet potato fries, bake them, and make sweet potato latkes out of them.  What else can we do with two medium sweet potatoes and a long, skinny one?

Well, let's get the dehydrator out and dry some sweet potatoes.  First, we have to get the food processor out and put on the slicing blade.  It takes no time to transform the sweet potatoes into something that resembles orange potato chips.  In about 12 hours they'll look even more like potato chips except they won't be fried.

Once they are sliced, you soak them in a bowl of water for a couple of hours.  This draws the excess starch out of them.  Make sure they are all wet by stirring them around from time to time while you wait.

After an hour and a half or two hours, take them out of the water bowl and shake the excess water off of them and then put them on a dish towel and pat dry.

Place them on the dehydrator trays and brush them with a light coating of coconut oil.  I'm wondering if this step could be sped up by putting them in a container and shaking them with coconut oil, but maybe the time saved would be offset by the time it takes to clean the container?

Then sprinkle the sliced sweet potatoes with cinnamon and flip them over and do likewise on the other side.

Put the trays on the dehydrator and turn the setting to 145 degrees Fahrenheit and allow them to dry for 10-12 hours.  You'll be surprised at how much they've shrunk, but all the flavor has condensed into sweet sweet potato chips.

We store them in a mason jar.  (But we don't have to store them for long!)