I dug my sweet potatoes today. I got a quite a few. I wish I knew how to dig them and not break so many. Is there some special technique to do that? Some of them are as far as 18 inches away from the center of the plant. I just never know where to start digging. I should have enough anyway.

The whole batch


Just before digging


One hill I dug yesterday.

Nice sweet potatoes Tom. My family loves them baked with butter, cubed and roasted with olive oil and sea salt, and candied at Thanksgiving and Christmas. My body building Grandson eats them because they are so nutritious.

I had a 2 lb one last night for dinner baked with butter. I'll have to try baking with olive oil and sea salt. There are some injured ones that I need to use right away. Maybe I'll give that a try tomorrow. Always have candied at the holiday! Of course Sweet potato pie is on the list of things I really like too. (There aren't many things that aren't on my list! )

Good looking harvest you had...
I'm not sure how you dig them but I use a potato fork. I am able to gently ease the tines into the soil and flex it to loosen the soil. Then you can sift through and pick out the sweet potatoes. An occasional one might get a tine poked into it but very few are broken.

Concur: I grow them on lists which does tend to confine the roots. I usually use a standard pitch fork although I have used a potato hook on occasion. have to be more carefull with the potato hook. Nice lookling poatoes Tom, I have a couple of weeks to go before I start digging.

Thanks, I used a comon four tonged garden spade. I try to loosen the soil around them far enough away to avoid them but some times I seem to break a few. I also noticed that some of them close to the top were chewed on, most likely by mice? The rabbits didn't seem to go near them.

I use a heavier fork than the standard pitch-fork/hay-fork. It is just what I have and I bought it to move mulch from truck/trailer to garden wheelbarrow. All my sweet potatoes are growing in 4'x4' up to 6'x6' boxes that rest atop the soil in my raised garden. These boxes were made to keep my various varieties of garlic separated. When I dig up my sweet potatoes it will be time to plant my garlic.

All my sweet potato plants are still lush with leaves. Generally by mid to late October, after a light frost or two, the plants will yellow, indicating it is time to dig them up. I start by digging down with the fork at the perimeter of the box, carefully turning that soil over, collecting any potatoes, and then moving a foot or so towards the center of the boxed in area. I don't bruise or pierce many potatoes doing it this way.

Rabbits here love to munch on the sweet potato leaves but the greatest munchers are deer. I have to cover all my leaves with a heavy plastic mesh to keep those critters at bay.

I grow them in a feed bag folded down with dirt in it. Then, I just dump them out one by one as needed. They did very well that way. I think it protected them from most bugs too. Except one had an ant nest, so far.I didn't get any store size for baking, but they are very good. The stringy ones go to the chickens. NO DIGGING REQUIRED! Going to try it with all my potatoes next spring.

What a lovely harvest Tom. My Filipino friends (and me) also make chips out of them. Just cut them up to the size of French fries and dip a whole lot in self-raising flour with a beaten egg through. Then just fan them out in the bottom of a frying pan with about an half inch of oil. The idea is that they are not supposed to come out separate but in adhered groups. Delicious.

Sounds good!

That does sound good! Does anyone eat the leaves/vines (which are also apparently edible) ??

Tom, you made me curious so I just had to dig a hill of Carolina Rubys to check thier progress. Looks like they are going to do ok. Note that the list does confine them so they pretty much come out in a tight bunch.

They look nice, I haven't seen slips in that variety available. Now I'm going to sound stupid, but what is a list?

Farmerdill, those look beautiful! Every now and then we get some red sweet potatoes in the grocery store, but I can't remember what they call them... and yes, what is a "list," or was that a typo?

A list is a continuos hill. For sweet potatoes. about six inches high and 12- 13 inches widewith a trench between the lists. Today I use 36 inches between rows, but in my youth we used 42 inch spacing. When I was a kid we we ran them up with a two horse plow. When we got a tractor used a disk lister. To day I use a lister on the tiller, actually I use the Till-Row attachment.

Man, what a fine farm you have. It puts my handful of Vardaman sweet potato plants to shame.

When will you harvest those sweet potatoes?

Well, I guess that's what I do then, but I cover them with a plastic mulch. This was a picture taken in July. Some of the sweet potatoes produced roots outside of the list and they were the ones that I often stabbed with a fork. I have one of those V shapped hilling attachments for my tiller.

Tom, what's a "list"?

Ken -- this is what Farmerdill posted: "A list is a continuous hill. For sweet potatoes. about six inches high and 12- 13 inches wide with a trench between the lists. Today I use 36 inches between rows, but in my youth we used 42 inch spacing. When I was a kid we ran them up with a two horse plow. When we got a tractor used a disk lister. To day I use a lister on the tiller, actually I use the Till-Row attachment."

Now I can get on with my day, I've learned something new!

Thanks, Sandy. One's never too old to learn a new term.