Harvesting Our First Sweet Potatoes
We harvested our sweet potatoes the second weekend of October. Like so many things we’ve done, it was yet another first. We planted 16 slips in May and harvested 78 pounds! After the initial daily watering, these sweet potatoes took care of themselves. We did trellis them because we were gardening in a small area and wanted to give them some extra room to spread, however trellising is not necessary.
The Harvest
The first picture above shows our sweet potatoes just before we harvested them. They do not need to be trellised, but we chose to help save garden space. See how the leaves are starting to turn yellow? That means it’s harvest time!
After cutting and pulling the vines away, we could start to see some of our sweet potatoes sticking up through the ground (as seen in the second picture).
The last picture shows our sweet potato bed after harvesting. We planted our garlic in that space a few weeks later.
While the amount of our harvest is something to be proud of, we were disappointed in its condition. We have a small amount that is undamaged. We consulted with our gardening expert who heads the Backyard Gardeners Program that we have been participating in to learn if we had grown food for our family or for our chickens. Through her information (which we share with you in the upcoming images), and close inspection of our harvest, we have determined that our sweet potatoes are edible, but they will only last a month or two in storage. Thus, I will soon be looking into ways to preserve nearly 80 pounds of sweet potatoes!
The Cracks
Here you see cracking in a sweet potato, which most of them had. This was probably caused by the weeklong rain we had just prior to harvest. Had we harvested the weekend before, this may have been avoided!
The Holes
Another issue most of the sweet potatoes had were these holes. They were most likely caused by wireworms. According to our expert, not much can be done to avoid this. The best method is to use crop rotation. We also hope to allow our chickens to scratch through the garden before next summer’s planting to help reduce the amount of wireworms. She suggested we cut into a few sweet potatoes to see how bad they were damaged on the inside. After cutting into them, we saw that the wireworms didn’t go very deep and left minimal damage. We decided we could cut out the holes when we went to cook them and these would still be edible.
The Breaks
The last issue was we broke some of our sweet potatoes while harvesting them. We were warned to be careful as this could happen…but we still broke some anyway. One of the ways we broke them was by accidentally stabbing them with a pitch fork. The sweet potatoes were much more spread out than we had anticipated. Fortunately, it’s not that many (compared to our other issues). Our gardening expert said these should scab over and still be good to eat, but just like the other two situations, they will not last very long.
The Good
Not all of our sweet potatoes were in that bad of condition. Check out this almost 4 pound beauty!
The Verdict: Growing Sweet Potatoes was a Success!
We planted 16 sweet potato slips in May and after watering daily the first two weeks, we gave them no care. These 16 slips grew into almost 78 pounds of sweet potatoes. Despite the damage, they lasted us throughout the winter. In the beginning, we did start baking and freezing some of the sweet potatoes. However, after checking them weekly we saw that most of them stayed firm. We are now considering using some of the remaining sweet potatoes to try starting slips for the next growing season.