Sweet Potatoes

For weeks I’ve been poking around in the sweet potato beds. They grow so fast, they can get too big very quickly. If they get too big, then they can get fibrous or stringy so I will boil them (gently boil them), then grate them and use them for casseroles or whatever I’m using them for. I love (love, love, love) sweet potato pie – any pie really – and Vince isn’t crazy about it, which I cannot understand but I found this recipe for Sweet Potato Pie Cookies. Since I’m going to use purple sweet potatoes, mine will probably come out some icky shade of brown but that doesn’t bother me. I don’t know if I will make this recipe today but I will make it within the next week.

Back to the story . . Sweet potatoes take 75 to 90 days to grow to a good size here. I planted some slips in mid-May and I’ve already harvested most of those. But, as I cleared out other beds, I planted more in early June and then when I harvested potatoes in late June, I replanted those beds with sweet potatoes. I figured those planted in early June would be ready in late August to mid-September. I’ve been poking around in the beds and I wasn’t feeling anything so I figured, for some reason, that bed wasn’t going to produce. I need that bed to plant kohlrabi so today I started pulling up the sweet potato vines and look what I discovered.

I weighed it and it was 14 pounds but then I found three or four more so I probably got 20 pounds out of one 4′ x 4′ bed. The potatoes that grow in the raised beds will go all the way down to the soil beneath where the raised bed soil starts and because that soil is so rocky, we will end up with some weird shaped potatoes.

That one just curled right under itself.

I would cut that one in the bottom of the “U” so I could scrub it better and bake the two pieces for us both to have baked sweet potato.

The potatoes will store longer than a year. When I want an orange sweet potato, I’m still using the ones I grew last year. I store them in big boxes with shredded paper and keep them in a dark, cool area of the basement.

I try to keep a watch on them and if one starts sprouting, I will use it right away.

When baking them, this is what I usually look for – a large one for Vince, and a small one for me. I’ll scrub off all the little roots

I kept the sweet potatoes outside where it’s still warm and humid, on a rack, where they will get some sun but not a lot, and let them cure for about a week. Then I’ll move them to a rack under the covered porch for about 5 days and they will continue to cure, then I’ll add them to a box of shredded paper in the cool basement.

There are still quite a few beds to dig. I’ll harvest them out of two more beds today and the rest will be harvested in a couple of weeks and we’ll be set with sweet potatoes til next year’s harvest.