Sweet Potato Observations

Today is Thanksgiving for those of us in the United States, and we truly have many thing to be thankful for...the most precious is knowing to Whom we are giving our thanks! Thank you, Lord, for Your many blessing!

I helped my daughter make a sweet potato pie from scratch yesterday to help celebrate today's holiday. We grew the sweet potatoes here at the farm, and had our best year ever for production. I am still learning though, and next year I will be tweaking how I plant my sweet potato plot!

This year, I loosened the ground in rows, added organic material and cottonseed meal, planted tubers with little plants on them, and then just let the vines go everywhere. When they tried to cross paths and invade other places in the garden, I steered the vines back into the vine mass.

We dug them over the past couple weeks, and the biggest sweet potatoes were in the loosened, enriched soil...but there were MANY little ones in between, as the vines will put down roots to make sweet potatoes wherever the vines touch the ground. These little potatoes were mostly nuisances, and I know I did not get them all, and I fear next year they will be coming back with a vengeance, popping up vines all over the place. So...next year I think I am going to trellis the vines in my rows somewhat to keep a better handle on where the tubers end up!

I do plan to put at least some of the little sweet potatoes to good use, by keeping them for planting next year. Some I will store in the house, and some I am going to bury in the garden to see how they keep buried in the cold soil. I want to see where the best place is to keep them.