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!!