I dig them in the garden, but I don’t like eating them. I never have and I’m guessing I never will. Too bad for me, I’ve been told, missing out on such a sweet and healthy treat.
This was Mrs. Gardener’s idea, planting sweet potatoes. As Mr. Gardener, I was interested in the project, curious to see what would happen, but as an eater, I didn’t care much whether they were a success or not. I saw them as garden insurance: something to grow and fill a space if something else I had planted didn’t. She got the idea reading an article in Mother Earth News last spring about how to grow sweet potatoes. Unlike Irish potatoes whose vines grow from a hunk of potato planted in the ground, you start sweet potatoes from a slip, a few inches or more of vine and root pinched off of a sweet potato partially submerged in a jar of water. At the time, I thought the slips were growing too slowly (maybe I think that about most growing things), and when we did plant them, I was sure they wouldn’t do well, they were so small. But they took hold and took off.
Later season vigorous vines
The vines really grew well, especially later in the season. We gave them a later start, partly because we didn’t read the article until the end of April. We probably should have started the slips in late March to be able to plant them a month sooner than we did. But what did Mr. Bad Sweet Potato Attitude care?
One day in mid-September, Mrs. Gardener and I were visiting Smith and saw the tops of two sweet potatoes peeking up from the soil like dirty, orange prairie dogs. Even I was excited to know that the plants really had produced something. But when to pick them? We read and studied still more about this plant we’d read a lot about already. We decided to dig them before a serious frost. With nighttime temperatures in the forties these days, I grabbed the garden fork and we took advantage of a perfect fall afternoon to hunt for buried treasure.
Hidden gold unearthed
Searching for them was a lot of fun though a tiny bit nerve racking, like hunting for buried Easter eggs, because we wanted to dig thoroughly without breaking the fragile potatoes. Almost magical the way a few would appear with a fork full of soil. We laughed to see it. At the end of the search we ended up with 20 potatoes. Some have tiny holes but don’t seem to be soft or rotting. We don’t really care, because we learned. Next year, I’ll buy proper seed sweet potatoes (we used store bought), and start them earlier.
Our haul
We are now curing them in a box with a lamp. Newly harvested sweet potatoes need to be in an 80 – 85 degree atmosphere for a week or so. It toughens up the skin so they will last longer, several months in a cool basement or root cellar. These little beauties also need to sit for a month or more to increase the sugar content. According to the article, newly picked sweet potatoes don’t have much flavor for a month or so after pulling them, as if I care about their taste. Maybe they will be ready by Thanksgiving. For sure by Christmas. And who knows, maybe I might just like a sweet potato pulled from my own garden.
