Daily Archives: November 5, 2014

The Sweet Potato Harvest

Last weekend we dug up a bunch of  sweet potatoes and transferred them to the cellar, where they’ll be curing for a few weeks under a fan.  If they promise to be sweet enough by Thanksgiving, we just might let them out of the basement for the celebration.

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Earlier that afternoon I’d been staring at the pretty greenery of the sweet potato terraces I’d constructed back in the summer.  Armed with a shovel, I hesitated for a minute, worrying that I might accidentally cut some of the little beauties open at first strike of the ground.   I thought a little blessing might help prevent casualties.  May this be a bountiful harvest,  I whispered before taking a plunge into the ground.  It didn’t work; as soon as my shovel hit the ground, I split a beautiful big sweet potato right in two.

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Suddenly it occurred to me that using a hoe might be a much saner approach to harvesting sweet potatoes.  It was.  From that point on I had fun pulling them out of the ground in one piece.

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Next year we  hope to get an even bigger yield by using drip irrigation from our rain barrels.  This year I found the biggest potatoes in the sections of the terraces where the soil stayed moist.  Those potatoes that had the misfortune of being in the under-watered areas  suffered.  When dry, the  sandy loam tends to clump up into little blobs, leaving a little shriveled potato in the mix.

We look forward to dining on sweet potatoes this holiday season.