We have never grown sweet potatoes before. It was just on a whim last spring that I picked up some plugs at the nursery. They survived the arid summer and thrived. I dug one hill the first of this month and we had some sublime (but simple) baked sweet potatoes with butter and sea salt.
About a week ago, I went down to the garden to look for the cat (who had busted through a small hole in a window screen and had spent the day gallivanting around the yard.) I found her lolling in the garden (she loves to roll in the dust—nice) and I also found sweet potato flowers.
They are rather pretty!
After a quick google search, I found that sweet potatoes are related to morning glories and that the more they flower, the better the end result will be.
Fast forward to yesterday afternoon. We were finally getting to cleaning out the garden—yes, we had had our first freeze. Hubby had covered the sweet potatoes, so they hadn’t frozen off yet. We decided to go ahead dig them all up.
You will not be able to imagine what we found! Behemoth sweet potatoes!
The biggest ones.
I had three behemoth beauties that weighed in at 3 lbs. each.
Apparently the appearance of sweet potato flowers are a sign of a good harvest. We dug a five gallon bucket full.
Enough sweet potatoes for the holidays and more!
And even after I took the giant mutants out of the bucket, I still had an impressive harvest.
I would have called this a successful bounty.
I have been digging all the pumpkin recipes everyone has been posting. I think I have enough sweet potatoes to do quite a bit of experimenting and converting recipes.
Stay tuned for “Sweet Potato-palooza!” 🙂
Awesome. I’ve yet to bake one on my grill. I find that baked potatoes in general are better on the grill than in an oven.
That is amazing! I bet you were so thrilled. My favorite way to prepare them is to steam them for 30 minutes and then bake them for 30-45 more minutes in the oven at 425…it is the way my Chinese in-laws always prepare their sweet potatoes / yams. So good!
Thanks for the tip. I will definitely try that with some.
A-mazing taters there…so what can we expect? Fries, roasted, chips, mashed, pies, cookies, bread? Can’t wait to see what comes up.
I am making a swee’tater list and checking it twice!
[…] we would have this spring and summer, I remembered that I still had some really nice (and huge) sweet potatoes sitting in a bucket in the corner of the […]