{Pictures from April.} I wrote before: “On April 25th (writing this down for future reference) Jeff planted a few sweet potatoes. We’ve never grown them here before and thought it would be fun to try. They’re in a large black pot to keep them warmer and Jeff puts a cover over them at night.” 

Jeff wanted to experiment with growing sweet potatoes this year. He chose a deep purple variety. We know farmers in the valley (an hour from here) who have success growing sweet potatoes. We don’t have an ideal location here for growing them, but that didn’t keep Jeff from planting some for fun. Jeff and B took care of them and checked on them all summer, wanting me to come visit the sweet potatoes regularly and see their progress. I admired the green leaves each time, wondering how big the tubers had grown, and shared in their enthusiasm.

Come October we wondered if it was harvesting time and while my mom was visiting, Jeff and B harvested them. They were so beautiful! I should have cut one open to show you the rich color inside, but you can see a little on a potato on the far right in the picture above. (There was also more corn harvested. Jeff held up the bowl for me to take a picture, with his gloved hands, straight from harvesting.) Jeff said the sweet potatoes needed to be cured before we could eat them. I had never heard of curing sweet potatoes before and was surprised. Turns out, you do need to cure them. (Today I just came across some more information on that in Teri’s post.) Jeff cured them and then the wonderful day came when he baked them. They were incredibly sweet and so. darn. good! That was a happy experiment!

P.S. All the squash is in. Towards the end of our garden season, some zucchini got ignored and those went to the chickens. But we brought in lots of winter squash- butternut squash and spaghetti squash. I kept waiting for some of our spaghetti squash to turn yellow, and some grew more yellow than others, but it was definitely time to harvest them. Good thing we all like squash so much because we’ve got plenty of it on the menu!