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.
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