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Post by macmex on Oct 5, 2019 11:19:09 GMT -6
Last night I started this year's sweet potato harvest. While we have had warm to hot weather up until now, I understand that cold rain is coming soon. So, it's time to dig. Cold rain harms the sweet potato's storage quality. The sun was going down when I started, so I only got to dig two plants (hills) of Red Wine Velvet. I'm greatly encouraged! First, when I pulled back some of the plastic mulch, a western rat snake scurried away, retreating further under the plastic. He's my FRIEND as he eats rodents! In past years I've lost up to 40% of the harvest to rodents.
The second thing that really encouraged me, was that I encountered good size roots and production at the farthest end of the row, from where my irrigation enters. This is huge. It's taken me years to figure this out, but no matter how much rain we might get, if the weather's hot, I need to water each row overnight, once a week. The heat causes the moisture to bake out from under the plastic. However, if I water every week, that same heat helps my plants to make a prodigious harvest.
This was the harvest from just one plant. I've seen better, but I'll take it!
So far, today, I've dug a couple more hills. There has been no rodent damage and the roots are of good size!
More to come! How's your sweet potato harvest coming?
George
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Post by john on Oct 6, 2019 18:29:50 GMT -6
Hi Mac Sweet potatoes did very well for me this year. We had lots and lots of sun and warmth with very little rain. One thing that I am thrilled about is that the variety 'Hayman' which I grow every year has outproduced all the other varieties. (I grew White Travis, Carolina Nugget, Mississippi purple, O'Henry,Julian, Morado and Tennessee Top Mark and White Triumph. I got my start with Hayman's by purchasing some sweet potatoes on the eastern shore of Virginia. They are a local favorite there. I have been growing them for almost ten years now and usually they rank among the lowest producers. Hardly worth even growing if they didn't have sentimental value to me. This year they were planted on the property of the house we just purchased. So it was new soil that was really kind of on the poor side. I tilled a strip horizontally across a slight sloping area of the yard. I made the hills and pushed in the slips. Everything grew very slowly at first so I wasn't even sure I would get a harvest. So the Sweet potatoes pretty much got ignored. Eventually the Hayman's took hold, then they grew and grew until they covered the 4' strips of lawn on both sides of the row. (Some of the other varieties produced small vines and tops yet still yielded good roots.) The Hayman's were insanely vigorous and thrived growing over the lawn. Also there was no rodent damage! I have lost entire rows to voles in the past. I finished my digging today and now plan on curing the harvest for the next week or two.
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Post by macmex on Oct 7, 2019 7:08:47 GMT -6
You know, John, sometimes it's a mystery to me, why a variety laguishes and then, suddenly thrives. I think sometimes it just takes us some years to stumble on a cultural requirement that they need. Another idea, which I can't rightly explain, seems that some varieties take time to "adjust" to a locale. I have about 12 varieties and a couple have been slow to showing their worth. Cook Family Heirloom, for instance, just hung in there for about four years, before "snapping out of it" last year. Last year it did great. I just dug that variety, and again, this year it did great! I don't know what changed. However, in my experience, once I get a variety to do well, it generally continues in years to come.
Ozark County has been, for me, like Hayman was for you. A couple in Missouri received that sweet potato for a wedding gift and grew it over 50 years. No one grows something 50 years if it doesn't produce well. Missouri isn't far from me. I wonder what the different conditions were, as Ozark County has been slow to produce for me. Maybe this year it will finally "adjust" and kick in. It's a high quality root.
Digging early might have something to do with avoiding rodent damage. So far, I haven't seen any rodent damage. I'm ahead of schedule on digging, but wishing I'd started two weeks ago.
Here's a photo of some of the harvest. I got my sweets planted in Mid June till the end of the month.
Most of these are Cook Family Heirloom.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Oct 7, 2019 8:05:12 GMT -6
I wonder how much pH plays a part in bumper crop sweet potato production or in the near failure of that crop? That might be something to look into. It would certainly be an interesting topic of discussion and would provide grounds for engaging experimentation in years to come.
I would be very interested in conducting sweet potato trials along those lines, if I weren't so covered up in gardening chores already. I keep a quarter-acre garden by myself. I harvested a little over 900 pounds of tender okra pods this season with no outside help. Many of those pods were tiny, pickling pods less than 2" inches long. We made several quarts of pickled okra for the extended family, plus gave away several bushels of freshly harvested pods to friends, family, and neighbors ... It was a good year for my okra, despite the heavy rains and poor growing conditions.
I only had 3 & 1/2 rows of okra this season, but those few rows kept me extremely busy. Not to mention the 120 caged tomato plants that were putting on over 200 pounds per harvest at their apex.
I only planted about a dozen sweet potatoes this year, but they seem to have done extremely well, considering the pressure they endured from the marauding deer population.
I have not harvested any sweet potatoes yet, due to the time and energy put into harvesting several hundred thousands of okra seeds, trying to beat the threat of mildew. However, I did stop just long enough to take a few photos of my sweet potato plants, because they seemed to be extremely prolific this season, with some of the vines reaching as long as 23' feet in length. All my sweet potatoes are Beauregard this year. That variety has become my mainstay over the years, due to its deep orange color and the smooth texture that my wife likes best, for baking.
Despite the many varieties I've tried growing over he years; each year, my sweet potatoes seem to produce tubers in excess of 3 pounds. I don't know what causes this?
Rather than producing multiple, 8 ounce tubers, each plant seems intent upon producing a tangled mass of huge tubers, very few in number. (This is not a desirable trait, due to the extra effort it takes at processing time.) A sweet potato the size of a small loaf of bread is not a fun thing to try to cut up to fit into a baking dish. Not to mention the presentation is not as pretty to look at, as a row of nice, uniform, 8 ounce tubers, all nestled side by side under a sea of gooey marshmallow and brown sugar glaze. This is what I see in my garden, daily ... Deer love browsing my sweet potato vines and have cost me more production than almost any other factor in years past. Despite heavy deer pressure this year, my vines have been prolific in their ability to provide effective weed control by means of blocking out sunlight. One of the drawbacks to using sweet potato vines as ground cover, for weed control, is the inability to walk through them without damaging the vines or getting them tangled around my feet. This is just a glimpse at what lies below, as this potato has seen fit to expose itself to damaging sunlight, causing me to employ the help of burlap, coffee bean sacks in a futile attempt to protect it from harmful UV light. Despite my best efforts, the wind and heavy rains always find a way to uncover these tubers, causing them to take on an undesirable, green cast ... The tube of chap-stick is all I had with me as a size reference. I'm guessing from what little I can see, that this tuber will be in excess of 5 pounds at harvest time.
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Post by rdback on Oct 7, 2019 21:29:56 GMT -6
... I have lost entire rows to voles in the past. Voles are my nemesis. They wiped out my sweet potatoes two years in a row. So, I thought I'll fix their butt. I built a 4x6 foot frame and covered the bottom with wire (hardware cloth). Plants grew great. Had a frost, cleared the vines and ready to harvest. The potatoes grew down to the wire and formed nicely. However, while I did get some potatoes, they got their share too. They tunneled under the box and chewed every potato that was resting on the wire lol. I've given up on sweet potatoes.
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Post by macmex on Oct 8, 2019 5:03:47 GMT -6
I can think of three probably reasons why I've escaped rodent damage, so far, this year:
1) I got a cat, who loves to hang out in the garden. 2) Snakes are making a comeback in my garden. I've been leaving them places to live. For several years we had few if any snakes, except some garter snakes and brown earth snakes. The rat snakes had disappeared. But in the last year or two we've had a resurgence of king snakes and rat snakes. 3) We've had summer weather until about two nights ago. I suspect the rodents are just now, about to switch over to their "hoarding for winter mode."
I have noticed that the average size of our roots is considerably smaller than normal. This is most likely due to getting them planted a bit late and the cooler weather we experienced for much of the summer.
RD, I feel your pain. It's so very discouraging to put so much into a crop and get so little out of it.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Oct 8, 2019 11:10:49 GMT -6
I have a friend who grows potatoes inside a round bale cattle feeder. He drops his seed potatoes on top of the ground, in the bottom of the feeder and covers them with a thick layer of straw.
At harvest time; he flips the round bale feeder out of the way and picks potatoes right off the top of the ground. The potatoes don't 'burrow' under the soil, but instead, grow quite well, under the thick layer of straw (About a foot thick layer of straw). After the vines are cleared away, you just push the straw aside and harvest potatoes without digging.
If there was a layer of straw below the potatoes, just above the hardware cloth (as a spacer) would that slight separation put the sweet potato tubers out of the Vole's reach?
Would a bed of concrete patio pavers, below the potatoes work in place of hardware cloth? If they were covered with topsoil and a metal or treated wood barrier placed around the borders, that might create an impenetrable space for growing sweet potatoes.
This might be a good community research effort over the next few seasons. Anyone out there looking for a vole proofing research project?
Thanks, for posing the quandary, rdback. It will give us all something to think about this winter.
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Post by john on Oct 8, 2019 17:45:45 GMT -6
Rdback I understand exactly what you are saying about the voles because my vole pressure is super high. In years past I have had to harvest my potatoes around labor day just to prevent the voles from getting every single one. They will go through a whole row in short order. I start heavily monitoring my rows as soon as roots start to form. I feel for tunnels in the rows. I have used poison baits, starting early in the season. This will help. I was blessed this year with very low rodent pressure and I was able to harvest later without any problems. If you live in an area with densely vegetated fields nearby. I think vole pressure will always be higher. I have done a hardware cloth barrier around my patch, dug 12-16" into the ground. It still was not 100% effective! The voles managed to find a way in. I did away with that system. Ron that is interesting you mention pH. I was wondering about that too. The soil mine went into was brand new and had a starting pH of 5.7 . I added some hydrated lime because I needed a quick fix, but I doubt the soil ever got above 6.
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Post by john on Oct 8, 2019 17:51:51 GMT -6
Ron do you start your potatoes slips in a little pot then transplant after they have rooted in the pot? I have done that before, and I got a few huge roots that were in a big mass just underneath where the main stem goes into the ground. The roots weren't spread out properly and I think it affected how the roots grew.
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Post by macmex on Oct 9, 2019 5:37:40 GMT -6
Regarding PH, I grew sweet potatoes in white alkali soil, for years, in Central Mexico. The ph was quite high there, to the point that I had to spread sulfur on my garden to lower it. The sweet potatoes always produced exceedingly well. From this, I deduce that if ph is a problem here, it's low ph (too acidic).
Yesterday I dug Ozark County and several more varieties. Ozark County and Oklahoma Red both made smaller harvests. I've never had a really large harvest from Ozark County, but Oklahoma Red had given me bumper crops before.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Oct 10, 2019 15:18:05 GMT -6
John,
That was an interesting observation. I usually grow a 'mother' sweet potato in my South kitchen window all winter, then cut slips from it to start in small pots. I never thought about the roots being bunched up. That might be the problem?
Thanks, for the hint. I doubt if that would have ever crossed my mind.
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Post by macmex on Oct 11, 2019 10:37:32 GMT -6
The sweet potato plant makes it's main roots from the first ones to grow on the stem. That's why I prefer slips with very few roots, or none at all, when I plant. The slips quickly produce roots, which then reach for the moisture below. This causes their largest sweet potatoes to be better formed.
I am SORE today! Yesterday I took the day off and spent almost every available moment digging sweet potatoes. By dark I was about done in. However, for the first time in my life I made it through an entire sweet potato harvest:
1) Without finding a single root which had rodent teeth marks on it. and...
2) Without spearing a single root with my fork.
Now, if I can ever add "without breaking a root," I will have arrived!
The harvest was very good this year. Here are a couple more photos.
Red Wine Velvet excelled this year. Here's production from a single plant. I had 10 such plants in a row, without a skip!
Here's a new variety (for me). I don't know much at all about the flavor of White Eclipse, but it sure is impressive with production.
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Post by macmex on Oct 13, 2019 5:42:26 GMT -6
Sometimes it's hard to understand why a given variety does great and another doesn't, or why a variety does great one year and not so great another. I think you're referring to Grand Asia, which is a red/purple skinned variety with white flesh. For me, it generally makes really large roots. It does keep extremely well, though, 2 1/2 years is probably a record!
For me, Molokai has always mirrored Grand Asia's performance. This year, for instance, both did only marginally well, which was a complete surprise, as they are generally top performers. I suspect it's because of the unusually cool temperatures, early on.
Planting on a "hill," which is actually a ridge, helps with excavation at harvest.
You did well by waiting a couple of months to eat the Grand Asia. They can be eaten earlier, but my experience is that they develop their best flavor after Christmas. Before that, I eat one and think, "Hmm, well, that was just okay." After Christmas, when I eat one I think "Wow! Now I remember why I want to grow this one every year!
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Oct 13, 2019 20:27:22 GMT -6
Josh and I started digging up one of our Beauregard sweet potato plants right before dusk tonight. We got 37.6 pounds of potatoes off of the one vine before it got too dark to continue following the roots.
The biggest tuber weighed 10.6 pounds, the runner up weighed 9.6 pounds, the third largest one was 5.8 pounds and an assortment of softball size to golf ball size stragglers that made up the remaining 11.6 pounds.
This is my middle son, John. He says, "Big potatoes just make the steaks look smaller." I'll be the first to say, "That boy can sure sock away some steak!" You wouldn't want him on your 'All You Can Eat Buffet'. I don't believe even he could finish that potato he's eyeing though. The one on the right weighs 9.6 pounds, the one on the left weighs 10.6 pounds.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Nov 6, 2019 18:14:16 GMT -6
I found a video tonight about growing sweet potatoes in tubs, to avoid being attacked by Voles. It looks like this method worked for this guy anyway. I don't know if it would work for everyone though?
Here's the URL to that video, enjoy:
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