Monday, October 22, 2012

Harvesting Sweet Potatoes

In June, Steve and I with the help of my dad planted about 40 sweet potato plants.  Well, it is time to harvest. 
Once they come out of the ground, we have found that keeping the dirt on them keeps them fresh longer. We lay out a large shelf in the garage and store them here until ready to cook.  Sweet Potato Chicken Soup, Sweet Potato Chili, etc.....  I'll be restocking the freezer over the next three weekends.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I am redesigning our garden this fall.  The rows that we have used in the past is too much for me to maintain working full time with two small children.  You can see in the pictures above the amount of grass around the rows. We are moving to more raised beds. I was able to follow Steve in digging up the sweet potatoes this weekend.  As he broke the ground loose to find the potatoes, I moved the dirt into one of our beds that I have built.
I made this bed out of reclaimed, broken cinder blocks that I found free on Craigslist and lying around the yard. It isn't pretty, but it was free and I kept all of these materials out of a land fill.  This long narrow bed is where we hope to relocate our strawberries and plant blackberry bushes. It will become a permanent fruit bed.

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