Digging the Sweet Potatoes

This is the first year I tried growing sweet potatoes. I put them in one of the water trough raised beds because I thought it would be easier come harvest time.

June 1

July 6

August 28

I must admit, I got a little impatient. Most of the references I checked said 90 days to harvest, so based on the time stamp on the first photo I waited until Labor Day to do a test dig. One tuber was bigger in diameter than a softball, but very oddly shaped - like it grew toward the side of the raised bed and had to double back on itself. The others that came up were on the smaller side so I decided to water deeply several times a week (we were in a mini-drought) and let them go a few more weeks before harvest.

Filling in the walking paths

Finally this week I took the plunge. I started by hacking back the vines, but as I pulled up the vines I discovered the vines had started setting tubers in the mulch and under the weed barrier around the raised beds.

Once I cut back all of the vines and pulled up all of the tubers in the mulch I attacked the ones inside the raised bed. Usually they came up in clumps around where the original sprigs were planted.

 One of the challenges with sweet potatoes is that the skin is rather delicate. I've read that in commercial sweet potato production they have to be hand-dug because mechanical harvest does too much damage. At one point I dug down in the dirt and tried pulling out one really big tuber, and this is what my fingernails did:

 Some were absolutely enormous, others no bigger than a fat finger. For reference, the holes in the sides of my plastic bins are about an inch in diameter. 

So here's all the tubers that came from the mulch. 

And this is what came out of the raised bed. 

What's next? They need to cure in a dry, dark place, and the weather we are having right now apparently is the ideal temperature for curing.

Not sure if I can wait much longer.