Sweet Potato Harvest

Our 2012 sweet potato harvest.

Whoo hoo! Our first sweet potato harvest came in this morning. Pulled from a 4' x 8' raised cedar bed at the side of the house, one that I threw together last fall and filled with layers of compost and shovelfuls of the clay that passes for soil in these parts, the harvest proved quite fruitful. (Sorry, pun intended.)

Although the soil had not matured fully by spring, after pulling the wintered-over cabbage plants and tossing in a few more errant red worms to work, I had tucked in a small flat of sweet potato starts late in the spring and hoped for the best. The fellow at the feed store where I picked up the plants had told me that "some folks hill 'em" (the plants) but that he didn't know if that was necessary. During the summer, I occasionally treated the plants to the raw-milk rinsings from the milk bucket, and infrequently side-dressed the plants with a dose of humic acid in hopes of enriching the soil and the plants. Starting out with virtually no research and with plants fed mostly on prayer, I guess we can count ourselves lucky to have hauled in 14.5 pounds of the rich vegetables.

As eager as I am to taste these, I will insist that we deplete the backlog of sweet potatoes garnered from local farmers' markets first. They may keep well, but the last several batches we've purchased have been less than optimally fresh to begin with, so I would rather eat them than allow any to go to waste.