Sweet Potato Harvest

There was much yard work to be done over the weekend to get ready for the first snow of the season.  We got an inch or so of wet snow on Sunday, but it was mostly melted by the end of the day.  I spent Saturday frantically getting the garden ready for winter, on the off chance that we got the 4 or 5 inches that were "possible" from the storm.  I had visions of everything being covered in snow until next Spring and that actually scared me into action. 

One task that needed to be completed was harvesting the sweet potatoes.  It was an experiment this year to grow them (we'd never tried before) and it was quite a success. 

I didn't so much "plant" the sweet potato as threw it in a collection of compost and shredded leaves from the previous autumn.  This was a seriously low maintenance experiment since it needed no tending whatsoever and because it was in range of the sprinkler, I didn't even need to manually water it.  

The leaves of the sweet potato vine were pretty well fried from the hard freeze we had over the last weeks, it was ready to come out. 

These were the vegetables of our non-labor - about a dozen sweet potatoes, three or four were pretty big.  After I harvested them, the remaining compost was broken down enough to top dress two raised beds in preparation for winter.  The sweet potato experiment?  Complete success.  A dozen sweet potatoes, virtually no effort, and a handy place to break down compost for use in the garden.  We'll do this next year for sure, maybe even have more than one sweet potato/compost bin.