Late Harvest

 Honoring the Ancestors at this season. Lighting a candle to show them that I am thinking of them and that they are welcome guests at my feast in their honor.

This is the time of the last harvest (not really, but it's all root vegetables and leafy greens), but I celebrate the late harvest and pray for sufficient food to get me through the Winter. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.

This also marks the traditional Celtic New Year. May your year be full of blessings, love, and appropriate abundance. Share your wealth.

Seeds

Spent flower heads of Compass Plant (Silphium laciniatum). 

Autumn is a time of gathering in...

Gathering in the final crops of the season... sweet potatoes, winter squash, winter radishes, cabbages (if you were fortunate enough to have a fall crop of cabbages... mine failed), and seeds. 

The spent flower heads above have dried, bearing mature seeds. Today I collected the last of them, which I will share with a couple of native plant enthusiasts.

The compass plant that bore the seeds is somewhat precious to me. Several years ago I found compass plant, which typically grows in open prairies, growing among a grove of red cedars. I was told that the presence of compass plant could indicate that an area is unplowed native prairie. This intrigued me. Beneath those trees lay an unplowed prairie that might spring back to life if the trees were gone.

Well, I wasn't going to cut down all those trees... but what if I tried digging up one of the compass plants?

I consider compass plants to be quite majestic. Their basal leaves look like large ferns. The flower stalks can get very tall. The stalk bearing the above immature seed heads was at least seven feet. The flowers look somewhat like small sunflowers rising above the prairie grasses. 

I have always been enamored of compass plant, which seems kind of rare.

The name "compass plant" comes from the tendency for the basal leaves (the leaves growing from the base of the plant) to align their edges north and south. Some indigenous people believed that lightning struck frequently where compass plant grew, so they would not camp in those areas. They also then burned roots of the plant to ward off lighting during storms. 

I wouldn't want to burn the roots of this precious plant no matter how vicious the lightning.

The roots grow very deep, which is why the plants survived to live among the cedars. I knew that digging up large tap roots to transplant can be chancy, with no guarantee of a new plant.

So I went out with my shovel in late winter/early spring to dig one plant.

I was ecstatic when I saw the first new leaves later that year. 

It took a few years for the plant to get as large as it is today, but it is a beauty. Starting it from seed will be a new project for me. Many native wildflowers require "stratification" (freeze and thaw) to germinate, so I will start them as a "winter sowing" project. I wrote about winter sowing as part of a post nine years ago. I also found a site that gives a good step-by-step for winter sowing, but focuses on garden vegetables instead of wildflowers. I've never tried it with veggies, but have had success with wildflowers. Winter sowing is a great activity for the Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Christmas season.

Seeds of native plants also make great gifts for any native plant enthusiast, by the way. Vegetable and herb gardeners also might enjoy receiving seeds of new or unusual varieties. Get your holiday gift buying done early!

Dig This

 

Pruning shears for size reference.

I dug one hill of sweet potatoes yesterday to see if it is harvest time.

And look at this! 

All of this from just one plant, and 24 more plants in this one bed. Of the six beds of sweet potatoes -- approximately 250 plants all totaled -- this one bed might be the highest producer. It was one of the first beds planted and the orange sweet potatoes -- Beauregard -- tend to be larger with more sweet potatoes per plant than either of the whited-fleshed or all purple ones. The Beauregards planted a couple of weeks after these also might produce less. The only way to know for sure is to dig them up.

Today I removed the fencing and cut away all the vines in this one bed. I will wait a couple of days to dig. That supposedly gets the curing process going. It also makes this big job (remember, 250 plants more or less) a little more manageable, taken in smaller steps.

In the meantime, my husband is cutting back the vines poking through the fencing. I was depending on the deer and rabbits to keep the vines pruned back to the fence. After  a solid start on the task though, they got lazy.

Once we get all the roots dug up, I will cart the sweet potatoes (500 pounds and more, we're hoping) up to the attic in buckets. This is the warmest place in the house when the sun shines, so it will provide a good temperature for curing. The sweet potatoes will get packed into boxes and crates to maintain humidity. The curing process changes starches to sugars, making the sweet potatoes sweeter and tastier. You can eat them right out of the ground, but they don't taste as good. About two weeks is the recommended curing time, but longer doesn't hurt.

After curing, we'll pack the sweet potatoes into sturdy plastic crates, sorting by size and variety, and put them in the root cellar. The best temperature for long term storage of sweet potatoes is between 55 and 60. Packing them in crates keeps the humidity high around them.

My husband ate through last year's crop by January or February (they're mainstay of his diet), so I'm hoping this crop lasts a bit longer. The rains we had in late spring and early summer helped get the sweet potatoes on a good start. And I watered them regularly. 

Anything you can do with regular potatoes, you can do with sweet potatoes -- stews, fries, chips, mashed -- plus. They also lend themselves to sweet dishes, and don't necessarily require additional sweetening.

The white-fleshed sweet potatoes are even sweeter than the orange ones, while the all-purples ones are starchier, but oh so tasty and pretty. 

Nutritious, flavorful, and pretty easy to grow. That's the sweetness of sweet potatoes.