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!  

"Weighing" Luna

Luna, our little Jersey heifer, was born in late October 2015.  She is small in stature. We have a registered Jersey bull named "Chuck" on the herd, but we have had Luna separated from him until she was big enough to safely breed.  Chuck roams with Daisy and Rosie and Clarabelle.  We recently had our veterinarian make a farm call so that he could palpate the cows.  We found that Chuck had successfully bred both Rosie and Clarabelle.  Daisy was still 'open,' but we saw activity during Daisy's last cycle and think she was exposed.  Hopefully she is now bred.  We'll have to wait and see.

Here's the thing: Chuck is getting big and is starting to get mean and ornery.  He likes to hit you with his head when you walk out in the pasture.  Jersey bulls can be very dangerous and we don't want him on the pasture for much longer.  Our goal (and why we named him Chuck) is for him to breed all of our cows and then send him to the slaughterhouse.  This leads us back to the subject of this post - Luna.

As I was saying, she is small.  Tricia is concerned that she is too small to breed.  The only way to know for sure is to weigh her.  Since we don't have a scale, we use the next best thing - a weighing tape.  This tape has weight markings on it for Holsteins, Guernseys, and Jerseys.  The Jersey markings are the markings on the bottom row. If you look closely, the verbiage along the bottom says, "Lightest Jersey Breeding Weight."  The black line says that the lightest weight for Jerseys is 530 pounds.

You are supposed to put the weighing tape around her body right behind her front legs.  Then put the tape together and the weight is where the tape meets.  In this case, we see that Luna weighs 550 pounds.  She is 20 pounds heavier than the lightest Jersey breeding weight.  Although she is small, according to this, she can safely breed.

This is good news to us.  At some point next week, we will likely put all the cows and heifers together on the pasture.  The next time Luna comes in heat and if Daisy comes in heat again, Chuck can service them.  If successful, we'll have four baby Jersey calves within the next year, some coming as soon as in about 5 months.

Luna has been cordoned off it her own pasture up to this point.  Now that she is of calving age and size as confirmed by the weigh tape, we can introduce her to Chuck.