When to Harvest + How to Cure Sweet Potatoes

This video is a derivative work of the Touhou Project. Hey you all, Farmer Jesse here, gonna talk today about sweet potatoes, when to harvest them and a little bit about when to cure them, how we do that in a market garden context. So let's do it. First things first, if you're not subscribed to this channel, make sure to hit the subscribe button because if you are subscribed, you're awesome. Here's the thing. If you clicked on this video just to get the answer of when to harvest sweet potatoes, here it is. Basically, sweet potatoes will grow until frost. You want to harvest them before a frost, preferably, but if the leaves get frosted, you just need to mow them immediately and then you have about a week to kind of pull the sweet potatoes out. They won't, that won't damage them, even a light frost on the ground is not going to damage the sweet potatoes unless you get a freeze. That's it. Basically, that's how you harvest sweet potatoes. If that's what you came for, please hit the like button, hit the subscribe button. We'll see you later. Thank you. If you wanted to get a little bit more nerdy, stick around because we do it a little bit different in the market garden context and it works kind of like this. We start checking our sweet potatoes after about 110 days. So for us, I think this year, that would be the end of August. We had a good rainy season. If it's not rainy, we're not going to check them until September. But at the end of August this year, we started checking them and we noticed that they were sizing up pretty well. You can see in this little clip, that's the size that we're really looking for for our first couple rounds. It's like these nice sort of maybe half dollar size or a little bit bigger, good roasting size sweet potatoes for market because we can put three of those in a pint and sell that for one for $3 or two pints for $5. That's how we do all of our marketing and even with sweet potatoes, even with potatoes, even with okra, everything fits into that scheme. That's been really helpful for us. Customers love it. So that's kind of the scheme that we follow. So like I said, we'll start checking sweet potatoes after about that 110 day, 120 day mark just to see where they're at. The reason is sweet potatoes are not a tuber. They're not like potatoes where they'll senesce and you'll see the plant sort of dying. Sweet potatoes are a root and they're just basically going to keep growing until a frost, until they die, which means that you can end up with rugby balls for sweet potatoes, giant sweet potatoes, which sounds great in a yield context, but it's actually not great for us as farmers because as market farmers, because we, it's harder to sell those rugby balls than it is to sell kind of good roasting size. So you want to kind of in between what I showed you there and maybe double that size, but you get much bigger than that and they can be a little bit difficult to market. We start checking them. When we start to see, we'll spot check the whole patch and when we start to see enough that look at that size, we'll mow one row and we'll harvest that. And the reason that we'll do one row is we usually get in the early harvest just about 200. I think this last bed was just under 200 pounds for a hundred foot bed. We want at least right around that 200 pound mark. Ideally when we start harvesting the bulk of it, we want to get to about 220, but those first beds, we were cool with about 200 pounds to get them to market a little bit earlier because it takes two weeks to cure sweet potatoes. If you don't cure your sweet potatoes, nobody's going to come back and buy them because they don't taste sweet. They taste starchy. You got to cure your sweet potatoes for about two weeks before you sell them. So that's what we do is we start and or before you give them to a CSA. So that's what we do is we get them out about as early as we can one bed and that usually gives us like two weeks worth of sweet potatoes. And then the next week we'll harvest another bed. And then the next week, usually the rest of the patch is ready to go and we'll harvest the rest. So it's sort of like a succession harvest where we're harvesting a little bit early. We use a little bit, we lose a little bit of yield, but we get to market a little bit earlier. The second one is a little bit closer to the yield that we're expecting off of the bed. And then the third yield is basically what we want. And it's, it's generally about two weeks before our frost date. So where some people will go all the way to the frost date, we've found that we just end up with our variety, which is golden nugget. We end up with too many rugby balls, which is great in our kitchen, but we can only eat so many rugby balls given we can eat a lot of sweet potatoes. We can only eat so many rugby balls and honestly that should apply to all sweet potatoes, Beauregard, all the other varieties. You can tell that our leaves on these sweet potatoes are a little bit different than what you get for like, yeah, like the Beauregard has that heart shaped leaf and a lot of the commercial varieties do. Ours are more of a heirloom variety, I guess. And the best variety we've ever grown, like I said, golden nugget. But these rules, these ideas should apply to all sweet potatoes. And one quick thing of note about these greens is that they're edible. So throughout the month of August, we'll basically sell these greens in big bunches or give them to our CSA. You want to rip everything off the main sort of woody stem. All of this is super tender. So we'll make big bunches of that and we'll sell it that way. Adds a little value to your sweet potato pat. And it's popular in like Vietnamese cooking and South African cooking. Look up some recipes. It's delicious. And then for the actual harvest, what we're going to do is actually mow it. Not too low because you'll actually damage the sweet potato. So but we'll mow it. And then like you see in that video, I'm just going to take the, I'm just going to take a shovel or digging fork, lightly pop the surface and then pull the bunch out. And that's it. So it's, it's maybe more disturbance than I like. But if you have really loose soil or if you have sandy soil or if you have really like nice raised beds that are really loose, I said really a lot, but that's cool. Then you should just be able to pull them out. But for us like that soil in that particular plot is kind of dense. So I do have to pop it and then pull them out that way and then grub around to make sure I didn't miss any. Remember that sweet potatoes grow down. Regular potatoes grow out laterally. Sweet potatoes go down. So sometimes you will get some that are kind of deep in there. So you do want to grub around and make sure you don't miss any. One thing you may run into is called skirf. It's this really dark color. You can see like this is what they normally look like, right? But this really dark color, it's called skirf. We don't get very much of it, but it comes up and it doesn't do anything to the flavor. It doesn't do anything to the storage ability. The only thing it affects is its marketability. Like people don't really want to buy a sweet potato with like whatever this weird sort of black spottiness is. So if you come across it, it's still totally edible, but not as marketable. Next, once we harvest that first round or any round, we cure them. Let's not overcomplicate curing. Curing is not that complicated. You need to get your sweet potatoes to stay at about 80 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks in really, really high humidity. That's kind of it. So that's pretty easy for us in the South. We don't have dry air. So I don't know if you lived somewhere that's, if you live somewhere that's a little bit more arid, maybe you'd want to figure out how to adjust that humidity a little bit more. For us here, what we do is we put them in a greenhouse. If it's a little bit cooler, with it totally opened up, you don't want to cook your sweet potatoes, put them in a greenhouse, cover them up with a thick blanket, and that's it. That's pretty much all we do to cure our sweet potatoes. The blanket provides the humidity because it traps in all the moisture that's sort of evaporating off of the sweet potatoes. And then the greenhouse obviously traps in the heat. And it protects them, that blanket protects them a little bit, moderates, modulates, is there probably a better word for that, keeps the heat at a more consistent level. So that's our 80 to 85 degrees, does not have to be perfect, it can go up to 86, it can go down to 79, doesn't really matter. Keep them in that relative situation for about two weeks and we get really amazing sweet potatoes that last us all the way to March, sometimes April, if we don't eat them all. The two things that can really damage your sweet potatoes are too much heat, we've cooked them on accident by closing the greenhouse, too much heat will certainly cook them, that's how things work, or too cold. If they get frosted or frozen at all, done, they're done. They will rot and you can compost them and that's about it. We also don't wash them. I think it's not the best idea to wash them, one, because they'll get bruised, two, because they, you know, that dirt will help to kind of preserve them a little bit better. You don't have to worry if you get one that's split or broken or even busted in half, that's not a bad sweet potato, don't throw it out. That's a good sweet potato, it will heal. And the other thing is, if you get any of these like really tiny ones, put those back in the soil, unless you can eat them, because worms love them, worms love rotting sweet potatoes. I don't know, it's their thing, but they're delicious for worms. So we like to leave as many of those roots back in the soil as possible. Then we'll immediately, once we get our sweet potatoes out, we cast a, we put in a cover crop as soon as we can. So that's another kind of incentive for us to harvest some of them a little bit early, is to get as much cover crop in there as we possibly can, because it's not easy to establish a cover crop here after October. But I've also, I should also add, we have harvested sweet potatoes as late as November. Depends on the season, sometimes we get an early frost in October, sometimes we don't get a frost in October. So it kind of depends on where you are. Anyway, that's it. Quick video this week. Like this video if you like this video, let me know if you have any questions, good luck with your sweet potatoes harvests, and I hope they're delicious. I know they're delicious, they're sweet potatoes. All right, we'll see you all later. Bye. Anything else I can say about that? You're going to get a bunch of tar on your hands, that's a thing.