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.