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Post by heavyhitterokra on Sept 4, 2017 11:53:57 GMT -6
Here are a couple photos of the Evangeline sweet potatoes I grew in 2015. I planted them under white Plasticulture with drip irrigation running the full length. This was a good year for sweet potatoes. The plasticulture really seemed to help. Our little house dog barked at this potato for about an hour before we went to bed. Good thing I got this photo when I did, because, by the next morning, this sweet potato didn't have a head anymore. I guess that little dog got brave in the middle of the night and came back to kill this potato in its sleep. I suppose it did look sort of menacing to a little house dog.
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Post by john on Sept 15, 2017 5:21:14 GMT -6
That is a funny story. We have a little dog too, she is crazy and always barking at something. In your previous post you mentioned Beuregard, based on what I have seen them do in my garden, they may be the fastest maturing type of sweet potato.
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Post by john on Sept 22, 2017 14:58:11 GMT -6
I have started to harvest the sweet potatoes. I never can leave them in as long as I want because I am racing against the voles and mice which are beginning to discover the crop. Some varieties are getting hit harder than others. One variety that always seems to be a vole favorite is 'Diane' . Anyways, I am always surprised with differing results which occur in my garden. This year I have been pleasantly surprised that the variety ' Hayman' has produced the best it ever has. It has done very well, it is not known to be a high yielding type. This is the first year for me that it was a nice and heavy yielder. Most years it is barely worth growing. I keep growing it because it is sentimental to me. It is a favorite variety on Virginias eastern shore. The location that I am growing my sweets in this year has a tendency to grow very long potatoes. I am not sure why. They are pretty cool. Other locations produce differing results. One spot I tried last year had lots of wire worms. That soil was on the siltier and wetter side. In the dry poor sandy soil, wireworms are not a problem. One other observation so far is that the variety ' Mississippi Purple' is very early and produces many large roots. It has been the best purple type I have grown. I have many more types to dig, we will see what other interesting observations I can make.
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Post by macmex on Sept 23, 2017 7:19:41 GMT -6
It's really great to get a report, John! I want to start digging soon, for the same reason.
Oklahoma Red produces its longest roots when grown on harder, clay soil. Don't know if that might be a factor for you, there, or not.
How's you Roselle doing? (Oops! Never mind. I see you already posted about that!)
George
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Post by john on Sept 30, 2017 8:02:53 GMT -6
Some observations from my 2017 sweet potato harvest. I have been digging some more sweet potatoes each day. So far the best production has been from the Carolina Nuggets. They even produced some nice sized roots away from the original plant. It was the only variety that set useful roots away from the main stem for me. Plus they were the easiest to dig. They have a shorter, rounder shape and come right out of the ground. It would be a good one to dig with a plow or middle buster. I was also impressed with the Heart O Gold's and the Centennials. It was my first year growing those two and they produced very large, long roots. As usual Julian produced well for me, the problem with that variety is the roots often get very large and can have odd shapes and often have many sprouts on them. So the physical characteristics could be better. (However, they couldn't be easier to grow slips from) They do taste good. (in my opinion). I like potatoes that aren't super moist and I like them to be sweet. I don't want them to have a lot of squash type flavor either. (like Diane, AKA Garnet) The drier they are the more butter you can put on them. : ) I like a lot of the white types for the above mentioned reasons. O'Henry was a failure for me this year. It was my first year trying it and I expected big things from it. I have heard it is a sport from Beauregard, so I expected massive potatoes with huge yields. I am not sure why the yield was so bad, I know the voles got some, but usually I will at least find one plant that has escaped attack so I can make an evaluation of yield. I probably won't grow it again. This year White Bunch edged out Hayman for best yielding white. (the whites usually yield significantly less for me.) This year was no different. I was advised to try Brinkley white this year, Unfortunately my seed potatoes that I had planned to use for slips had gone bad by the time I was looking to start them.
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Post by macmex on Sept 30, 2017 13:29:58 GMT -6
John, I'll have to send you more starts for Brinkley White. Hopefully, mine didn't get eaten by rats and voles. I just started to dig today. So far the crop is fair, though, there is very noticeable rodent damage. I've only been digging some Red Wine Velvets. Last year Red Wine Velvet produced monster size roots, way larger than most people would want. This year they're all in the 1 lb range, which is more desirable.
Personally, I tend to favor the whites too, and for the same reasons. Grand Asia is my very best producer, and it has white flesh. But Brinkley White, most years, produces less than Red Wine Velvet.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Nov 4, 2017 20:00:04 GMT -6
I hand dug a 5-gallon bucket, brim full of Beauregard sweet potatoes a couple of hours ago. I only dug two vines, before it got dark. It would be hard to beat the texture of these potatoes. I just now finished my first sweet potato of the season fresh from the oven... A guy tends to forget just how good fresh dug sweet potatoes really are!
I'm not sure what makes them so special? Maybe, because they come on after a killing frost, so it seems like gold when you discover them breaking up through the ground in the Winter killed garden?
Thank you, God, for the excellent potato digging weather this evening!
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Nov 4, 2017 20:10:57 GMT -6
I just now found a copy of a couple of photos I took of part of my 2015 sweet potato harvest. These potatoes made my half bushel baskets look like Dixie cups. My biggest potato was a little over 6 pounds. My November tomatoes in the background weren't much, probably about golfball size, maybe a little bigger. The potato in front was one from a potato bag that I got from Reasors. I think the sweet potatoes were the Evangeline variety? I bought the original potato at a roadside stand in the Autumn of 2014, and grew slips from it for the next season. Voles ruined my 2016 harvest, so I lost this variety for 2017. I'll try to attach photos below. The second photo is not a two-headed monster; it's my Daughter posing with one of my sweet potatoes. upload photo albumspost image url for forum
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Nov 8, 2017 22:23:49 GMT -6
Here is my most recent harvest. They're not as big as the ones I grew in 2015 though... These are Beauregard Sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes in 2015, I believe were Evangeline.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Nov 13, 2017 14:23:21 GMT -6
Has anyone ever tried slicing a fresh sweet potato to feed it to their dog?
Our dogs love them so much that all my Wife has to do is click a knife on the cutting board and they both come running. She'll act like she doesn't know what they want and they'll start howling at her. It's kind of her nightly entertainment when she first comes home from work.
Every dog we have knows the words, "Sweet Potato!" It's like saying "Candy!" to a toddler.
We've been feeding them sweet potato slices for about the past three years. In Summer, when I run out of sweet potatoes from the garden, my Wife makes sure to buy the dogs one sweet potato every week, because it means so much to them when they hear her cutting off another slice.
At our house, you can always find a sweet potato with the cut side down on a cutting board, waiting for my Wife to come home, turn it over, and cut off another slice for her two little dogs.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 6, 2019 19:19:16 GMT -6
I was out in my garden this morning, on weed patrol and noticed the ground is cracking up, under the leaf canopy on my sweet potato vines. This can only mean one thing; Sweet Potato tubers are under there somewhere, trying to make their presence known to the world!
It won't be long now ... Can you imagine the the size these things will probably be, by this Autumn?
Today is only July 6th and they are already this anxious to bust out of the ground. More sweet potatoes busting hills of soil to make room for our Thanksgiving dinner. This is one of my sweet potato plants, used as an experimental under-story crop. The idea is to keep weeds in check amongst my okra plants. So far, it's looking just fine! I think this might be considered a success story to continue next season. (Just make sure to plant the sweet potato vine an ample distance from your okra roots) or the heavy feeding okra will rob your sweet potatoes of any size come harvest time. I found that out the hard way last year, during a similar experiment. This is part of what I dug up from the up-heaved location photographed above. I dug these in Mid-October. No wonder the ground was cracking so badly, back in July ... The combined weight of just these two sweet potato tubers was 20.2 pounds. One weighed 10.6 pounds, the other weighed in at 9.6 pounds. 2019 has been an excellent year for a lot of things, sweet potatoes were just a part of that goodness. (Thank you, Lord, for our many bountiful harvests).
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