Sweet Potato Harvest

The sweet potatoes are harvested! Yay!!! I posted about the experiment here. Much of what I learned about planting, growing and harvesting sweet potatoes came from the internet – mostly from Cristina’s post about growing sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes are a tuber. The tuber grows straight down and you have to be very careful digging around the tuber so you don’t scar it.

What Cristina recommends is that you start the sweet potatoes using slips. I didn’t. I just planted the whole sweet potato that had the sprouts growing out of it. See?

What I’ll do next year is take the little sprouts and let them grow into slips. Because I didn’t, a lot of the plant’s energy went into growing the chunk of sweet potato that the sprout was attached to.

When I planted this piece it was about the size of a marshmallow.

Other than that I’m pretty satisfied with the yield, although it was a little low – about 5 pounds. The plot was 4′ x 8′ so I’m not sure how much I should have been able to harvest. As you can see from the picture my soil is nice and sandy.

Right now they’re curing in a 75F room with plenty of humidity. According to my research, they need to ‘cure’ in a fairly humid environment for 5 – 10 days. We’re on Day 4.

Curing makes a sweeter sweet potato. After that they can be stored at 55F-60F at 85% humidity for 4 – 7 months. Since my yield is so low, I’m not worried about making sure they last for months. Thanksgiving alone will take care of this year’s crop.

I’m a sweet potato virgin so if any of you have any tips that you think I could use for next year, I would truly appreciate it.