I need to get the beds where I grow my sweet potatoes put to “bed” for the winter by adding more compost and covering them thickly with mulch to keep the weeds at bay, so it was time to dig sweet potatoes.
The deer really love sweet potato leaves and they hit these beds really hard all summer, so I wasn’t particularly optimistic about the harvest. Here’s what the beds looked like:
Planting the zinnias in with the sweet potatoes helped a little, but I think I am going to have to grow sweet potatoes inside a fence in the future, or resign myself to buying them. The first thing I did was pull up all of the zinnias.
Then, I located all the sweet potato plants (and one was growing right next to a fire ant hill, which I had to treat) and gently dig them with a spading fork (a pitchfork with really wide and flat tines). I ended up getting more than I thought I might. My guess is it’s about 10 lbs. We eat a LOT of sweet potatoes, so I will end up having to buy more.
The gardens are a mess and will require some work to get them back in order.
I can’t really fence this area, so I think that I will grow white potatoes here next year. I grew some here in the spring and harvested about 10 lbs of those before I had to pull them up so I could plant sweet potatoes. Potato leaves are toxic, so I hope that the deer will leave them alone.
Cathy At Home on the River 