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Sweet Potato Harvest

The sweet potatoes are being harvested, and there is a good crop this year due to the good rains we had in August and September.  Due to lack of space, we didn't plant any this year, but there is plenty to buy at the Farmer's Market or at the Amish community.


Sweet potatoes produce large, trailing vines that store their energy as golden tubers.  The luscious mats of green over clay are so beautiful, they would be worth growing even if they produced nothing.


I can't remember my parents planting sweet potatoes, but we lived next to an aunt that grew a huge patch of them every year, and I suppose that is where ours came from.  She was known for her ability to grow "slips" or sweet potato plants from a tuber saved from the last year's crop.  One year we were helping her harvest her half-acre patch, and there were bushels and bushels of them.  My cousin had just gotten her senior high school ring, and she lost it that afternoon among all those sweet potatoes.  Several people searched for hours, pouring those sweet potatoes from one bushel basket to another until that ring was found.  We proclaimed it a miracle akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

Sweet potatoes have kept countless generations of people from going hungry.  They can be baked whole in ovens or on hot fireplace coals, mashed and fried and made into casseroles that show up on my table for every holiday meal.  Sometimes, you can even make biscuits from them!http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6040080131675190209#editor/target=post;postID=4764346285438297433

And what's not to love about a vegetable that can be made into a pie?









Genesis 1:11

Comments

  1. lil red henOctober 19, 2012 at 10:32 PM

    We LOVE baked sweet potatoes! They are so easy to grow, given some rain and so good for a person. Daddy and Mama used to plant a couple of rows in their garden, after retiring, and sell them. She usually saved the smallest ones and when I would go visit for a day, she had them baked for our dinner. Oh so good!

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