Over Four Pounds
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.
Sweet Potato Bed
Here are the potato vines, about two weeks ago.
Frost and Beetle Damage
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.
Vines Ready to Prune
I stacked all the vines up in the center of the bed so I could easily prune them off using pruning lopers.
A Pile of Vines
Here’s the bed with all the vines trimmed off.
Harvested Plants
Of the seventeen plants, most were quite robust, but three or four were on the puny side.
A Good Sized Plant
This one plant weighed over seven pounds.
Drying on the Kitchen Table
Sweet potatoes need to be cured or allowed to dry out at a relatively warm temperature before being put into storage. Here’s most of the harvest curing on the kitchen table.
Wrapped and Stored
After a two week curing, we wrap the larger potatoes in newspaper and store them in our heated basement. They’ll keep a year in storage and maybe even a little longer. Left too long, they’ll start to sprout, which is okay, because the sprouts are a good source for sweet potato starts to plant again next season.
We grow a variety named Jewel or Jewell. It has consistently delivered good yields. It produces a lot of nice fat potatoes with very few stringy unusable roots. We harvested about 74 pounds of sweet potatoes. Not our biggest ever harvest from a single bed, but still pretty good.