Here is a photo of this year’s sweet potato harvest. It’s about 150 pounds. Last year we grew 118 pounds.

Normally we wait until two days before the first frost to dig up our sweet potatoes. But this year we’re going to be all over selling soap, so I thought we’d better harvest now before a frost took us by surprise.

The children harvested the sweets all by themselves (so I’m sure they missed some that are still in the ground). Hopefully they’ll sprout next year.

I was a bit disappointed by the harvest. But it was extremely dry this summer and we didn’t water the garden at all. Still 150 pounds isn’t too shabby.

Don’t you love the size of this HUGE sweet potato Fletcher is holding? It weighs over 4 pounds!

Do you want to know my secret? We use sawdust as bedding in the chicken coop. We grew this sweet potato in the old coop bedding that got dumped in the garden last fall. Sweet potatoes generally like sandy soil. But with our clay soil, we fool them by using lots of spent sawdust.

I’ll have to report on how it tastes after we’ve eaten it. Don’t worry, we scrub it really well. 🙂