2019 Sweet Potato Harvest By the Numbers

One last post on the 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest.  Here's how the sweet potato patch looked prior to digging them up:

Before

And here is an "after" shot once all the sweet potatoes were dug up, vines were tossed to the animals to eat, and a 4 inch layer of wood chips was spread on the soil to cover:

After

Quite a change, huh? As discussed in a previous post, we separated them out into different containers, grading them in four categories:

• Small roots and Pieces (to feed the cows),
• Small
• Medium
• Large Monster Sweet Potatoes (took two buckets to hold 'em)

I placed each container on our bathroom scale in order to see how many pounds of sweet potatoes were produced this year.  We always like to keep good records to see how things stacked up year over year.

And here is the final tally after all of them were weighed:

The large sweet potatoes weighed a total of 50 pounds.  The mediums weighed a total of 74 pounds.  The small weighed a total of 68 pounds and the bits and pieces weighed 34 pounds.  The grand total of the sweet potato harvest was 226 pounds.  Let's subtract out the small ones we'll feed to the cows.  We harvested 192 pounds of sweet potatoes for us to consume.  That surpassed our previous record harvest of 186 pounds back in 2017.

I bagged them up in onion sacks and hung them from the ceiling in the garage.  This allows good air flow.  It is best to allow sweet potatoes to cure for a minimum of 3 weeks to allow the starch to convert to sugar.  This makes for a better tasting sweet potato.

We look forward to eating a bunch of sweet potatoes over the next year.  The first ones will be cured and ready around Thanksgiving.  Perfect!

Late For Breakfast

Dateline: 19 October 2019 7:38 AM

During the week, it is still dark when I leave the house on the way to work.  On the weekends, we sleep a little later before heading out to feed the animals and milk the cows and the other morning chores.  Once the sun rises, the roosters crow and all the hens leave their roosts and head to the gate to wait on us.  They have very small brains, but they KNOW at which gate their people will come through to bring them breakfast.  We're enjoying a nice cup of coffee and don't mind if the animals wait on us for a little bit. 

They wait impatiently at the gate until I arrive.  I gently push them out of the way.  My hands are full - two milking buckets, a bucket full of water with two clean rags, and my cell phone as I'm on call all weekend.  Many times when I lift the gate latch and open the gate, a hen will dart out.  This is frustrating.  I'll set the buckets down and go chase the errant hen.  I'll make her promise to never do that again and once I have that assurance from her, I'll toss her back over the fence.

I walk toward the barn, opening the gate.  By this time, the two mama goats along with their kids notice my arrival and come running to the barn.  The cows look up and slowly make their trek in from the pasture to the barn.  Before the cows arrive, I open the nesting boxes.  We close them all at night so the hens don't poop in them.  Then I go into the feed room and mix up everyone's feed, adding minerals to the buckets and then I open the feed troughs.  These are sealed each night so rats don't poop in the feed troughs.

By this time the cows are at the gate.  I feed the Aussie the bull and Buckwheat the goat and then I feed all the hens some hen scratch mixed with laying pellets.  This gets them out of the way.  I learned the hard way that if you let the cows in before feeding the chickens, the cows will step on the chickens and you'll have crippled chickens.  Distraction is key.

The cows are let in the corral and into the milking barn.  They are washed up and then milked.  It takes approximately 20 minutes per cow to milk them out, including washing.  The goats are fed and then everyone is let out of the barn.  The lights are turned off and we go inside to pour milk and wash buckets.  It takes about an hour from door to door.  It is a lot of work, but it is peaceful - especially when the weather starts getting nice - like now.

We're always looking to make our process more efficient.  We've solved our mud issues around the barn.  The rat problem we were having is way better than it used to be.  I guess our main issue right now involves the hens.  One (or some) of our hens has developed a very bad habit.  They are eating eggs in the nesting boxes.  The broken yolk gets on the other eggs, creating extra work when packing up eggs in cartons.  We've read numerous ideas on the Internet on how to stop this.  So far, nothing has worked.

There is an old saying that "You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet."  That's true, but many of the eggs that are being broken are being eaten by the chickens - not us! 

Wrapping Things up in the Garden

Every day I've been driving like Mario Andretti, rushing home to harvest sweet potatoes.  The days are getting shorter, so I have to pack a lot of work into an hour and a half.  To the best of my calculations, I think I have exactly one and a half days left of harvesting and then I'll be done.  Each day after harvesting, I immediately cover the soil with wood chip mulch to discourage weed growth.

When we get finished, we'll begin planting.  We need to get that done QUICKLY!  Our time is running out!  The sweet potatoes just seem to be a bumper crop this year.  They are plentiful.  They are big!

There's really only a few things producing now... Sweet potatoes, peppers, eggplant, louffa gourds, and okra.  Sweet potatoes will be done in a couple days.  Eggplant are almost done.  Okra will continue until the first frost.  We're eating a bunch of okra and have put some up in the freezer as "gumbo season" is upon us. 

Oh, I almost forgot.  There is one other thing still producing with no signs of letting up.  Zinnias.  You can't eat them.  Well, I guess you could, but I'm not gonna.  They're just pretty.  Previously, I would never use up space in the garden to plant flowers, but I saved seeds from zinnias I planted outside the garden last year and this year, planted them IN the garden.  I'm glad I did.  They really brighten up things.

It is nice to see the variety of colors.  Zinnias grow great in the heat of summer, too, and just keep blooming and blooming from spring to late fall!  I'll save the seeds from these and plant a row again next year. 

Bushy Tailed Bandits

The first cool front dropped temperatures into the 70's, but it warmed up with a vengeance after a few days of teasing.  It is back in the 90's again, but the weatherman said to expect another cool front, bringing temps back into the 70's.  I can't wait.  To celebrate this onslaught (hopefully) of cooler weather, Tricia and I have been thinking about driving to Beaumont and purchasing a new fire pit.  We've had our eyes on one outside Buccee's that is built in thick-gauge steel and built to last for a lifetime.  It has a grill on a pivot so that you can build wood fires on it and barbecue.  Our old fire pit has rusted out.  It did give us many years of service, so we can't complain.

Here's the other thing about the beginning of fall.  Leaves start falling.  That's a good thing, but something better falls out of the trees - PECANS!  Last year we harvested exactly ZERO pecans.  It was the first year that we didn't get any pecans.  Most years we pick up buckets and buckets of them.  We shell them and freeze them and use them throughout the year to snack on and to use in various recipes.

So craning my neck upward, I begin assessing this year's crop.  I can see some up there.  I began calculating how many future pecan pies will be baked when those pecans ripen and fall to the ground.

But we've always been told to not count our chickens before they hatch, right?  It was not until I looked down beneath the pecan tree that I saw the dire straits we're in.  Can you see what's littering the trampoline mat?

I'll zoom in a bit.  What you are looking at is chewed up pecans.  The stain on the trampoline is the rich pecan oil that has leaked out of the chewed up pecans.

Who is the culprit, the perpetrator, the vile, evil doer?  I submit to you Sciuridae.  That's the Latin family name for Squirrel.  The bushy-tailed bandit.  The rascally rodent.  It is nice to share, but if we aren't careful, the squirrels will eat every pecan and we will have no pie.  Troubling thoughts indeed.  I looked for a meaningful squirrel poem that would memorialize my thoughts, but alas, there are no poems about squirrels that capture my ruminations.  So I had to write one myself.

Our pecan trees are really loaded down

With thousands of pecans that will soon be hitting the ground.

But there's trouble in paradise and this is why,

The Bushy tailed bandits are eating my future pies.

They watch me each day as I drive off to my job

And they come out of their nests and commence to rob.

But I have a plan I'm cooking up in my head

It involves a shotgun loaded with high powered lead.

Then like autumn leaves on breezy nights,

The dead squirrels will fall from lofty heights.

I'll look into their beady eyes

And relish the thought of my rescued pies.

October 2019 Sweet Potato Harvest Begins

Each year October arrives.  College Football season is in full swing.  The first cool front blows in.  A few leaves start falling and you realize it is time to dig some sweet potatoes.  In springtime every year for the past 15 years or so, sweet potatoes pop up voluntarily (unplanted) and take over the garden.  Every year I say it, but it is so neat that this is one crop we never have to plant or tend to.  The vines gobble up 1/3 of the total square footage in the garden.  It looks like a jungle.  If you walk through it, you wouldn't think that there is so much going on beneath the surface of the soil.

I'm not gonna lie.  Digging sweet potatoes isn't an easy task.  You must get a shovel and turn over every square foot of soil, searching through and picking out the sweet potatoes you've unearthed.  The sweet potatoes ain't gonna dig themselves.  Let's get busy!

Beautiful sweet potatoes are just under the soil hiding.  We dig them out and toss them into buckets.

As soon as we dig them up and before weeds can overtake the garden, we're doing a new thing this year - we are putting a 6 inch layer of wood chip mulch over the dug up soil.  We'll talk more about this tomorrow or Thursday.  If you compare the first photo in this post with the one below, you can see that we are a little better than halfway through the harvest.  Wood chips line the harvested ground.

Here's where Tricia gets involved.  She's not real keen on digging, but she is a good "sweet potato sorter and grader."  She goes through all the harvested sweet potatoes so far and separates them by size.  We have a bunch more to sort/grade when I finish harvesting the other half of the sweet potato patch.

In the first bucket, we have the "bits and pieces."  These are the small roots that are just not worth it to peel and cook as they are too small.  Many of these get accidentally left in the soil and sprout up next year.  These we picked, however, get used by adding to our cow's feed.  Cows love sweet potatoes!

The next bucket contains the small sweet potatoes.  These will be peeled and cooked to make latkes, mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato hash browns and sweet potato pie or empanadas.

Then Tricia has graded out some large ones.  These will be baked in the oven, cut in half and put melted butter over them.  Yum!

And finally, there are the mutants.  These are ridiculously large.  They are definitely edible, but you have to watch them as some of them will be stringy or woody.

It is crazy how monstrous some of these are.  Look at Big Bertha, right here:

Nothing is wasted in this harvest.  I think the animals have October circled on their calendar.  They love it when we harvest, because the sweet potato vines get tossed over the fence and there is a fall feast going on!  From the 9 o'clock position in the photo below, there is Salt, Pepper, Rosie, Annie, and Clarabelle all eating the vines.  They'll eat and eat and eat until they can't eat anymore.

I'm hoping to finish up the harvest by the weekend.  We'll give an update soon.

The Perfect Day

A cool front blew through late Friday, ushering in pleasant, low humidity weather and a north breeze that was reinvigorating.  Morning chores, for the first time in months and months, was sweat-free.  The animals seemed to relish the comfortable weather, kicking up their heels, frisky and happy.  I did some work in the garden (more on that tomorrow).

Russ drove in to spend the day with us as did Benjamin.  We had something very important to do.  It was election day.  We studied the sample ballot and headed off to the precinct.  We vote at a Volunteer Fire Station.  The same ladies work the polls each year.  They always have gumbo cooking and it smells good in there.  We go in the voting booth, close the curtain and cast our vote.  It was a special day because it was Benjamin's first time voting.  For years and years, we've always brought our kids with us to vote.  Now they can ALL vote for themselves.  What an opportunity to have a say in your government!  What a country we live in!

We do need to pray for our Country and its leaders.  John Adams had a quote that is very appropriate.  He said, "Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people.  It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."  As we drift more and more away from the Judeo-Christian heritage of our founders, what will we look like?  We can pray and we can vote.

It happened to be my birthday on Columbus Day, so after enjoying time outdoors in the garden, my wife called me in for some appetizers - Chicken Livers wrapped in bacon!  We were like magicians.  We made them all disappear.  The family went out of the way to make it a great day.

To add to that, Tricia had a Shrimp & Okra gumbo on the stove all day.  A good dark roux, fresh, homegrown okra, Gulf Shrimp, homemade gumbo file' and some smoked sausage.  Talk about good!

The icing on the cake, literally, was when Tricia pulled out this bad boy...

Chocolate Blackberry cake with mascarpone cheese and blueberries.  It was so tall, the cake dome wouldn't fit on top of it.  After we cut into it, we had to place a big mixing bowl on top of it to cover it.

We finished off the slices of cake for dessert and sat down ridiculously filled.

Then we sat and watched my #5 LSU Tigers take on #7 Florida Gators.  It was a battle and a great game and at the end of regulation, the Tigers came out on top.

I went to bed satisfied and truly blessed.  What a perfect day!

An Outlook on Farming in America in 2019

Image Credit

I read a good book by Wendell Berry called "The Unsettling of America."  I think it is one of those books that you keep in your personal library to go back and read again.  I recently read an article from the NEW YORKER - Wendell Berry that had some interesting quotes.  I pulled out a few excerpts that I'll post below.  The bolded part is the question asked by the author of The New Yorker and Wendell Berry's answers are below it.  Below that, in bolded green, I wrote down my thoughts as this article was so timely.:

What’s your outlook on farming in America?
Between 1940 and 2012, the number of farms in the U.S. decreased by four million. The absence of so many farmers and their families is seen as progress by the liberals and conservatives who have been in charge of the economy since about 1952. Meanwhile, the farmland and the few surviving farmers are being ruined both by destructive ways of production and by overproduction. The millions who are gone have been replaced by bigger and bigger machines, and by toxic chemicals. If we should decide to replace the chemicals and some of the machinery with humans, as for health or survival we need to do, that would be very difficult and it would take a long time.

Very sad about the dramatic decrease in U.S. farms in 72 years!  I was just talking to my Dad about the sentiments brought up in Wendell Berry's answer just last week.  The farmers that are left are in stretched very thin.  They are farming more land, with fewer employees and more expensive equipment.  They have very little time to be a true husbandman or steward of the land.  They plant and they harvest.  They don't have much time for being a caretaker for the soil.  Landlords are left with an absentee farmer on their land.  The farmers are trying everything they can do to make ends meet.  There is lots of stress as the stakes are much higher in farming these days. 

Why would it be so difficult?
Because there is no farmer pool from which farmers can be recruited ready-made. Once, we could more or less expect good farmers to be the parents of good farmers. That kind of succession was hardly a public concern. When farmers are taught, starting in childhood, by parents and grandparents and neighbors, their education comes “naturally,” and at little cost to the land. A good farmer is one who brings competent knowledge, work wisdom, and a locally adapted agrarian culture to a particular farm that has been lovingly studied and learned over a number of years. We are not talking here about “job training” but rather about the lifelong education of an artist, the wisdom that come from unceasing attention and practice. A young-adult non-farmer can learn to farm from reading, apprenticeship to a farmer, advice from neighbors, trial and error—but that is more awkward, is personally risky, and it may be costly to the land.

Here's where the rubber meets the road.  When I graduated from college, I remember my Dad telling me that my investment was the suit on my back and the briefcase in my hand.  My investment was next to nothing.  Every two weeks a paycheck was deposited in my bank account.  My Return on Investment was ridiculously high compared to his.  He didn't need to tell me, but his investment was much higher.  He had land and very expensive equipment (tractors, combines, trucks) - not to mention the upkeep and maintenance on both.  He had employees that depended on him.  He had capital improvements.  He had a production loan to cover the costs of seed, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides.  He had to pay the crop duster.  Back breaking labor was necessary to bring your crop in.  You were at the whims of the weather, the government, crop disaster, etc.   Then after harvest, the price you got for your commodity was always in doubt.  Prices could fall beneath the cost of production.  These seemingly insurmountable barriers to becoming a farmer make it very risky for a young person to farm. 

It seems counterintuitive for agriculture to keep moving in the present direction.
The solution is not simple in the approved, modern way. It’s not deterministic, which is what people really want. They want it to be decided by fate, or technology, or genetics, or something. To bring it back to politics, I was an Adlai Stevenson man when I was eighteen. I loved his eloquence. I couldn’t tell you now what he thought of farming. But when Eisenhower came in, his Secretary of Agriculture was Ezra Taft Benson, who said to the farmers, “Get big or get out,” a heartless and a foolish thing to say. My argument is that this ended official thought about agriculture. We were not to worry about it anymore. If farmers go to town that’s just more laborers for the labor pool, just more consumers of industrial food.

Oh, our agricultural research universities like LSU, funded by check-off dollars has greatly increased yields over time, but unfortunately the price of inputs has increased at a greater rate.  Farmers, if they are lucky, make just enough to 'give it one more year to see if it will get better.'  The "Get big or Get Out" quote by Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture, was perhaps a true statement, but to me, it marked the beginning of the end of the rich farming heritage of our nation's past.  Technology.  Productivity.  Innovation. All good, but the ability to grow more with less labor changed the fabric of rural America.  Young people left the farm and moved or commuted to the cities for employment.  Main Street USA crumbled and soon boarded up storefronts replaced bustling small towns.  We changed from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers.

Tricia and I moved to the country and as I look out of my front window, I see a field that was once in soybean production, but is now being surveyed and staked out for a new subdivision.  This is going on all over our country as fertile fields are being covered with concrete and starter homes.  In terms of agriculture, where do we go from here?  I don't know.  The shrinking pool of farmers in our country are still very productive.  They literally feed the world.  For those with a love of the land and farming, but an inability to commercially farm for whatever reason, there is still an opportunity to enjoy to pastoral life by having a homestead farm and raising a few animals and crops for your family on small acreage.  You won't feed the world, but you can feed your family, and that's a good thing!