Faith, Folklore, and Friends

We had such high hopes for our sweet potato crop this year.  Last year, we only had one bed full, and this year we planted two. We just ate all of last year's crop a few weeks ago. The sweet potatoes started out so well this year; the vines quickly spilling out of the bed. We pulled off the vines, and Hub started digging. (That is turnip greens in the upper right corner.) Our granddaughter, Adrienne, and her fiance, Nicholas, came to help us. Remember how well they started?  Here in Northwest Alabama, it stopped raining about mid-July.  We  had very little rainfall in August and September, and it is dry as a bone here.  Although we watered the sweet potatoes regularly, they suffered from lack of rain. There were many potatoes, but most of them were small.  The wheelbarrow below is our total crop this year.  Disappointing, but still enough to enjoy for a while.   We will try again next year.

Yesterday was July 1st, and that meant it was time to harvest the potatoes.  They were not all mature, but if we had waited much longer, the potatoes would get too hot, or literally bake,  in the soil. Our potato crop consisted of a 4x8 raised bed.  You can see the vines were ready... A few potatoes had a little sunburn.  I'm guessing last week's rain washed the soil covering them away. The soil is friable enough that we were able to collect most of them with our hands.  It was a hot day, however, and Hub resorted to the shovel before we were finished. Of course, this reminded me of those hot July days of my childhood when we harvested potatoes.  My parents planted a hundred acres; no. wait, it just seemed like a hundred acres when we started picking them up. There was a lot of them, though.  Daddy used his mule and a middle-buster. (Not sure that is the proper name; it was a type of turning plow.)  It was fun for the fi...