Tag Archives: sweet potatoes

Pulling the vines

Today I started pulling the sweet potato vines – the earliest ones have leaves that are turning yellow, and the nights are getting cooler, which means it’s time. We probably should have started digging them a couple of weeks ago, working from the earliest vines and moving toward the newer vines, which have taken over the rows on either side, but other things took priority. The end of the season is nigh, however, and the time has come.

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The thing about sweet potatoes is that they can be invasive, for lack of a better word. As you pull the vines from the frames themselves, you’ll find the tips of potatoes where they’ve started to heave themselves out of the soil.

Heaving sweet potatoes

 

This is, incidentally, how to determine where to start digging for the sweet potato bonanza: the potatoes will create mounds in the soil as they grow and displace the dirt. They’ll grow elsewhere too, of course, but the mounds are like the ancient Indian burial grounds that people build houses over: you know there’s something there, only in this case, it’s much more benevolent and will not suck your entire neighborhood into the netherworld a la Poltergeist.

Bonanza!

Because the vines have run rampant – why not, since we really had nothing else in that area? – when the vines crawled out of the rows in which the slips had been planted, snaking into the walkways and then into the rows on either side, a slow but steady takeover, they rooted down into the walkways as well as the rows. Leave them there, and they produce tubers in the walkways just as well as they do in the rows, as sweet potatoes don’t seem to care all that much about where they grow. As I pulled vines, the lumps in the walkways revealed themselves to be potatoes, grown right through the mulch and the plastic barrier. Some of them came up with the tugs on the vines.

Walkway potatoes

 

Some had to be cut out from the plastic barrier, as they’d grown too fat after the neck of the potato to come out easily.

Walkway rescue potatoes

 

Still others wound up growing sideways under the plastic, requiring a complete excavation.

Excavation potatoes

 

Keep in mind, this is just the beginning of the preliminary vine pull, and all of these potatoes were pulled from the walkway only, not the frames. In fact, these all came from the walkway two rows over from where the sweet potatoes were originally planted. Before it started raining, I’d pulled a pile of vines and came away from about 10 pounds of potatoes that were useless – they’d heaved out of the walkway and were scalded by the sun, rained on then dried, or eaten into by critters – and sixteen pounds of usable potatoes just from one area of one part of one walkway.

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This is going to be a banner year for the sweet potato haul, and that’s saying something as they’ve always done well here, even in poorer soil than this.