Today is a very exciting day in terms of harvest. We are going to be harvesting sweet potatoes from our raised garden bed!
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Harvesting Sweet Potatoes
0:51 Step One
2:58 Tips for Growing
4:54 Our Final Harvest
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, my name’s Lindsey and I’m here at the Urban Farm and today is a very exciting day in terms of harvest. We are gonna be harvesting sweet potatoes. These are some sweet potatoes that I have already harvested from this portion of this raised bed and also from another bed in the ground that we have. And we have some regular sweet potatoes as well as purple sweet potatoes. So hopefully the rest of this bed we get an equal or greater harvest.
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The first step I’m gonna do is kind of take off all these vines. So usually you wanna harvest your sweet potatoes before the first frost because once frost happens, all your vines will die. And then once the vines die, the potatoes, they can start to go and they can start to get bad. So you wanna make sure that you don’t leave them in the ground after a frost for too long. Lots of vines. This year I covered the vines with frost cloth. I protected them so they could be in the ground a little bit longer, and I think that helped them grow a little bit larger. I had these trellis supports up just leaning against the fence just to give them a little bit extra support. The vines like to climb.
Once you clear away, you can see where they are still attached. So here are sweet potatoes attached. In the ground here, there’s a vine. So this is a good indication that this is where sweet potato groups are going to be. Tuberose crops like sweet potatoes, they grow from a mother plant. So when we planted these, we planted a potato, and from those nodes it grew roots, which eventually turned into other sweet potatoes. You wanna be careful when you’re digging because this whole radius around here could have sweet potatoes. I have already cut into a few today, so, and I kind of like to unearth the roots a little bit just to get a better indication of where they might be. So here you can see this is a tuberose root. So this would have, if it was in the ground longer, would have created a nice sweet potato, but we can’t leave them in the ground long enough for that one to have produced.
So here’s one. So pretty small but will be tasty. So you always get a little bit of variety in size. We can see this is the root system. This looks like this was part of the potato that we planted. So a lot of times this will be bigger. You don’t really wanna harvest these potatoes. If you think about it. They’re really old and a lot of times they’ll be mushy in parts. But we can see here that we have this nice one. There’s a little crack in it, but otherwise a very nice sweet potato. So let’s keep looking right here and see if there’s more. I like growing sweet potatoes in raised beds. I think it gives them more space. You can control the quality of the soil a little bit better. They like well draining loose soil. You can also grow potatoes and sweet potatoes in a big bin or a barrel. That’s a great way to do it if you don’t have large beds. And it’s a lot easier to harvest them because you know exactly where they’re gonna be. You can always save, if there’s ones that are small or pieces of ones, I’ve been saving them. And then I’ll just use these to plant. And we can see here, have another one. They come in all shapes and sizes.
So this looks like this is going to be the majority of our harvest for this season. We would definitely have loved to get more, but we’re always trying to find new ways to grow and expand. And I think next year I’m gonna experiment with growing them in a barrel or I think that’ll be a really interesting experiment. But you can see we have lots of beautiful sweet potatoes and this is definitely a really fun thing to harvest. And it’s really exciting to see because you never know what you’re gonna get until you dig them out of the ground.
