One of my readers asked me a few years ago when a person should dig up her sweet potato vines and harvest her sweet tubers. You know sweet potato is not even related to the potato, which would make sense in that you don’t really cook sweet potato the same way.

Sweet Potato, or Ipomoea batatas are related to Field Bind Weed and should not be confused with yams. I guess enjoying sweet potato is not as common as I feel it should be. For me this tuber is an amazing food. The orange flesh of the sweet potato is full of vitamins and stores really well if harvested at the proper time. White flesh of the yam or the Dioscorea trifida are different from the sweet potato. I remember hearing people from down south calling sweet potatoes yams when I lived down there and it could be confusing. 

When I was a kid, I remember both my mother and grandmother cooking a number of sweet potatoes in the oven. I watched them cook the sweet potato and split it after it was softened, then putting some butter, maple sugar, or those tiny marshmallows over the surface of the sweet potato. This sweet smell would enter the room that was flooded with cooking turkey and amazing pies coming from the kitchen. How could a person ever forget those kinds of smells?

Mom would soften the sweet potato first and remove the skin and then put the flesh in a casserole bowl and place the sweet potato in the bottom, mix the butter and maple sugar. She would then mix up some crunched soup crackers with butter and maple sugar and layer this on top of the sweet potato mix. Finally, she would place a layer of miniature marshmallows on the top and she would finish cooking the sweet potato until the marshmallows turned a nice golden brown. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

I found a recipe on Facebook called Sweet Potato Recipes that is close to my mother’s. I do truly love my sweet potato vine. This sweet potato recipe became a traditional Thanksgiving dish in our home over the decades. But I digress. 

Sweet potato is supposed to be harvested from 70 to 100 days or from 3 to 4 months after you plant the little vine pieces. My dad and a friend of mine have grown their sweet potato vines in raised beds and had wandered outside their beds and were latter harvested. The common answer as to when these beauties should be harvested is after the leaves have started to turn yellow and before the first frost, which is now behind us. By all accounts we should be pulling them out in early October normally.

Another approach to harvesting is that you should allow the leaves to completely turn black from the frost, which is supposed to improve the flavor of the tuber, increase the vitamin content, and of course improve the yield. The only challenge is that once the frost hits the tuber will rot quickly. Little bit of a gamble with waiting much into October.

You are going to need to dry them out in the garden for 2 to 3 hours before you store them after you have dug them out of the ground. As you may already know the skin is, I feel, a little more tender than a normal potato and if you have damaged any of the tubers you are going to need to use the damaged ones quickly.

To cure these tubers, you need to store them in a humid place at 80 to 85 degrees F for about 10 days. Then gradually reduce the temperature and store them in a humid room at 55 to 60 degrees.

You can harvest the sweet potato with a spade-type shovel, potato fork, or as my dad does just pulling the tubers out of the soil with his hands. My dad grows his sweet potato vines in rich friable soil that he can push his hand into the soil a foot deep without having to slow down. The raised bed gardens make harvesting easy, and it allows an amazing amount of produce to be harvested. I am looking forward to these wonderful tubers sitting on a Thanksgiving or Christmas table this year.

Hope you all have a wonderful stroll through your gardens this week. If you see any issues don’t hesitate to email me your questions at [email protected]. Thank you in advance for all of your questions and your participation in our column.

Eric Larson of Jeromesville is a veteran landscaper and gardening enthusiast and a founding board member of the Ohio Chapter of Association of Professional Landscape Designers.