You can't judge a potato by the size of its vine

The first frost hit Virginia this morning, so frost-sensitive growing things won't proceed from this point. Jimmy had mentioned that the sweet potatoes needed digging, so I asked if we could help do that.

When I was a kid, as far as I remember, Dad didn't plant potatoes in our garden, until I was about a teenager. I vividly remember that first year when we dug them - it was like a treasure hunt looking for the potatoes attached to the root system. And those small new potatoes with the thin, thin skin - yum - can't get better than that.

Sweet potatoes aren't quite the same - it appeared that there was usually a bundle of them right where the plant came up - often they were all tightly packed in a vertical bundle. But then, sometimes, we'd find a couple further away - maybe where a runner had set down a root.

We got two large box fulls of sweet potatoes.

Sweet potatoes

Then we went out to the "patch". Jimmy and Regina have provided a little over 1/3 of an acre of ground to their church for growing things. The whole patch was used for growing potatoes (Irish potatoes, white potatoes) earlier this year - those were dug around 4th of July and provided to a food bank. Then they planted half the patch in butterbeans and half in corn with the plan to use them for the brunswick stew that would be cooked for the event at the church in the fall. That worked for the corn, but the butterbeans were a little late coming in - so Regina is freezing those for next year's stew.

The patch

From the potato harvest in the summer, there were a few missed potatoes that took advantage of being in the warm ground and produced a few more potatoes. This was like the digging of the potatoes when I was a teenager - except it was more of a treasure hunt. The vines had been killed back by the light frost this morning, so it was a bit of a hunt to find where a vine was, but when Jimmy would turn up the plant, there the little marble-to-fist sized potatoes would be found.

"Leftover" new potatoes

I'm not sure why it was, but sometimes the smallest plant would have the nicest sized potatoes, and sometimes the largest plant would only yield a few marble-sized ones -- thus, "You can't judge a potato by the size of its vine."

I wish I had had my camera with me in the garden and in the patch, but you'll have to be satisfied with pictures of the finished product.

p.s. Regina says that sweet potatoes need to sit for a couple of weeks after digging them to allow the sweetness to mature - that you shouldn't even take much of the dirt off of them - so we've put those two boxes on three-seasons front porch to continue to mature. But - the little new potatoes? they are ready to eat for dinner tonight!!!

Snaps and new potatoes for dinner