Saturday, October 31, 2009

Sweet Potato Harvest

Happy Halloween! In our small town, Trick-or-Treating is always moved to a different day from the actual holiday, so the excitement is all over here. Thursday night brought out all the ghosts, ghouls and goblins. Since my dogs are disturbed by people coming to the door, and since Chuck had to work, I shut our house up and went to hand out treats at a friends' house. We were busy for the entire 2 hours that the town has allotted for Trick-or-Treating, and noticed that the kids coming around were older than usual, and more plentiful. We suspect a couple vans full were bussed in from towns close to us. We only saw one group of kids I knew, my son's nieces and nephew. (Although the nephew was soundly sleeping in his strolled and could have cared less about the activity!) The older niece seemed startled when I told her I was Uncle Jerehmiah's mommy- apparently scary Uncle Jerehmiah having something as prosaic as a mommy was a surprising thought!

Our garden is about played out. We harvested the sweet potatoes. This year we grew Beauregard and Vardaman varieties. The vines were hit by our first frost, and turned droopy and dark. Chuck raked all the spent vines off the hill, and drug them around to the compost bin.


Then to dig them, he lay on his belly and scratched them out of the hill with a short-handled cultivator


It's a good thing we don't have to feed ourselves for the winter with our harvest- although I guess it's about as many sweet potatoes as we would eat. There are a lot of small ones, though. However, since I never met a sweet potato I didn't like, I'm pretty happy. Next year I want to try a variety called Red Wine Velvet- doesn't that sound wonderful?

2 comments:

Ruby said...

Wow, who carved the cool pumpkin???

Chuck looks very 'English gardener' here, except I'm not sure they harvest sweet potatoes on their bellies...

My garden looks Minnesota tragic at this point. Too bad you guys can't come help tidy it.

Willa said...

Sadly, we didn't carve the pumpkin- it was one of the decorations from the Halloween party at the dog park. I have a whole slew of pictures- someone did a terrific job. I'll post them over there eventually.
If we came to tidy your garden, it would be Chuck doing the work and me taking the pictures...