Sweet potato harvest 2010

On Tuesday, the boys and I dug our sweet potatoes. We had frost down in the bottom two mornings this week which didn’t hurt anything. A few of the leaves on the sweet potato vines were touched, but I don’t believe the notion that frost will go down the vines into the potatoes as some claim. I an inclined to believe that sweet potatoes can’t stand cool temperatures, and that if they are allowed to chill below 45 degrees they won’t keep well.

Anyhow, it was time to get them out of the ground and into the house. We planted somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 slips last spring. Sweet potatoes are easy to grow, and we’ve had very good success with their production. We plant the slips in ridges, mulch them a few weeks later when they’ve gotten going well, and then leave them alone other than pulling a few weeds. The only other chore for the season is digging them out of the ground.

I estimate that we harvested 10 bushels of sweet potatoes this year, approximately 600 pounds of these nutrient-rich little buggers. We sorted out the best ones based upon size and blemishes, filling 7.5 crates which I stacked inside. I made these crates a few years ago, and each one holds about 1.25 bushels. There was about 2 bushels that we sorted out to use first, the ones with scrapes, vole bites, blemishes, etc. So, there may be more than 10 bushels, but that’s okay.

We’ll eat from this harvest all winter and through the spring, assuming they cure and keep well. Generally, sweet potatoes keep very well for us. They are currently stacked in the children’s room, where they will stay for the duration. After they’ve cured for a couple of weeks, we’ll cover them so that they won’t have light shining on them which could encourage a few of them to sprout prematurely. Next spring, we’ll start slips from some of them for next year’s crop.