The Moment of Truth - Sweet Potatoes

 This past weekend was absolutely gorgeous.  Friday through Sunday, clear, dry, sunny.  Warm.  Breezy.  Perfect.  The coming week will be cool, cloudy and drippy.  So I've been hustling around making sure everything that you would want to do when it is dry is done.  Soil sifted and stored.  Containers cleaned, dried and put away.  Row covers folded and put in bins. 

I dumped all of my potato grow bags, stored the soil and packed up the bags.  I knew from watching the internet not to set my sights too high for this year's harvest.  I have plenty of potatoes but they are all small.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but makes the yield very low.  

What I was looking forward to is the Sweet Potatoes.  The vines were huge and thriving.  They went through the fence, put rootlets down into the gravel and still demanded daily watering.  And I was careful to listen to them and give them what they wanted.  I was still afraid I had all vine and no tuber.

That's the thing about roots crops.  

You never know how well you did until the moment of truth.

Oooo I see something in there!

Lots of somethings

The sifter above contains the harvest from one container

I got plenty of large baker sized and some that are more suitable for cubing.

I still have some vines tucked into ornamental plantings that need to be dug up.

This is the combined harvest from both of my containers.

I cleaned them off and set them on the strawberry cage  

to sort by size and ready them for curing.  

I plan on prepping them and putting most of them in the freezer.

Here is a Joe Gardener video about harvesting, curing and storing sweet potatoes.  

And an article on freezing them to store.

The last tomato plant.  I picked all of the tomatoes, pulled the plant and 

repurposed the soil into a bed which needed amendment. 

This bed got all of the tomato soil and some of the potato soil because both of these were topped with shredded leaves which made a nice combination.  Next year my Dahlias will be planted here but I also planted some of the smallest potatoes to see if can get an early crop in the spring.  Because I only grew in bags there would be no missed spuds to sprout as volunteers.  So I volunteered them.

My meager lettuce crop.  Better than nothing!

Brussells Sprouts.  I've removed the insect netting and put that away.  They can't do much damage at this point.  The sprouts really haven't done much despite being watered every other day.  I'm hoping some cooler wet weather will stimulate some growth.

The Nasturtiums are at their peak and the bees and even hummingbirds are loving them.

The Dry Creek bed grasses are also at their peak and are giving some autumn color.

This Strawberry Marigold is right outside the garden shed door and I admired it each time I walked by.

Another "more fun when it's dry" project is compost.  I turned my existing piles and dumped out one of our compost tubes which we used over the winter for kitchen waste and which has been sitting since early May when we emptied the other tube and began filling it.  From left to right - the tiger lilies, the cornstalks and the kitchen waste.

The strawberry bed has been weeded and mulched in preparation for spring.

And finally the Clematis Vine which I cut back to the ground in early August has outdone itself in the second blooming.  The variety is Rebecca and it always has a few blooms late into the season but nothing like this.  The other side has just as many blooms.