by Noel | Oct 17, 2017 | CobraHead, Gardening
We harvested 89 pounds of sweet potatoes yesterday. That’s not a record, but it’s well above our normal yield, and we’re happy with the results. Our average sweet potato yield is about 80 pounds per bed. We grow a variety named Jewel (sometimes spelled Jewell). We’ve been growing Jewel from our own starts for over 10 years and we find it excellent for both yield and long-term storage, and they taste great, too! The potatoes were grown in...
by Noel | Oct 28, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
As the garden season winds down, we’re happy to report that we’ve had another great sweet potato harvest. I like to remind people that it’s easy to grow sweet potatoes even up north, here in Wisconsin. Here are the potato vines, about two weeks ago. We already had a light frost and the leaves were pretty moth eaten from Japanese beetles. I decided not to wait longer to get them out of the ground. I stacked all the vines up in the center of the...
by Noel | Oct 3, 2012 | CobraHead, Gardening
With frost forecast for later this week and knowing that I would be out of town, I decided to harvest my sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes cannot tolerate frost, so I did not want to take a chance on losing any of my crop. I had previously put a clear plastic cover over the bed as we had some nippy temperatures a week ago. The leaves under the plastic were already showing black from the previous frost and wilting badly, so I didn’t think I would lose anything...
by Noel | Oct 15, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
With several nights of frost predicted for this coming week, it was time to harvest the sweet potatoes. They will not tolerate frost. Here’s the bed of potatoes, thick with foliage. The plants are grown through a cover of black plastic which heats the bed up quickly in the spring and pretty much eliminates any weeds. Harvesting is much easier if all the foliage is cut away and removed first. This is the second year I used this sheet of plastic and it...
