By James Thomas 
Sweet potatoes are painless to grow and delicious to eat. But before you can cook with your homegrown take, you need to know how and when to harvest sweet potatoes and how to cure the tasty roots. They become tastier and sweeter in storage as their starches transform into sugar. This guide will help you harvest and cure sweet potatoes so you can appreciate them throughout the fall and winter months.
How long does it take to grow sweet potatoes?
Sweet potatoes take 85 to 120 days to grow. The days to maturity for the type dictate when to harvest sweet potatoes. Varieties with shorter maturing periods are best for northern climates. When containing sweet potato slips or starting your own from tubers, be certain to check the days to maturity for that specific variety and choose one that works for your area.
When to harvest sweet potatoes:
Because they’re a long-season yield, when to harvest sweet potatoes usually coincides with the dawn of needing a sweater and a headlamp for the final puppy walk of the evening. Of system, this depends somewhat on when you planted your sweet potato slips and what type you chose. A good indicator of when to harvest sweet potatoes is that the vegetation will begin to turn yellow. Sweet potatoes grow until frost destroys the vines, but the leaves start to fair as temperatures drop. Why? These warm-season plants are exposed to cold temperatures, so your first frost is a major element in when to harvest sweet potatoes from your garden.
While the roots are safe and confidential during a light frost, the sweet potato plants won’t survive. In a tough frost, the sweet potatoes near the surface of the soil can be injured. Additionally, when soil temperatures drop to 50 F degrees (10 degrees Celsius) or down, the roots can be damaged. These tubers can be consumed right away, but they won’t be kept in a warehouse. Cold, wet soil can cause the sweet potatoes to eat in the ground and become inedible.
Let’s also not ignore that sweet potato greens are edible! When to harvest the gardens differs from when to harvest sweet potatoes: Go for the spinach-like leaves and nodes when they’re young and tender. Don’t take too much, because you want the plant to be capable of having enough leafy green tissue to photosynthesize and send energy to its growing roots. Over-harvesting the leaves can lead to less tubers.
Sweet Potato Harvesting Tips
Sweet potatoes discolor easily, so handle them gently. It helps to cut and pull the vines two or three days before you harvest. This will encourage the thin skins to harden up a bit.
- Use a garden fork to reduce the soil by about 18 inches around the crown of each plant to a depth of 6 to 8 inches. Raise the sweet potatoes gently. Most will be close to the peak where the stems emerge from the ground, but some may be deeper or several inches out, so sift through the soil carefully to ensure you don’t forget any.
- It’s easy to skewer a heart with your garden fork while digging. Individual damaged roots for immediate use (just cut out and discard the injured area). For undamaged sweet potatoes, dust off as much loose soil as possible; don’t wash them with water. Stay for a day or two after harvest to let the soil dry—it’s easier to brush off then—and use a pair of garden gloves to gently brush off the soil. Don’t rub hard, or you might scratch off the skin. Cleaning each sweet potato allows you to read each one for damage—minor scratches are fine, but separate any that have been cut or scraped deeply for quick use.
Curing Sweet Potatoes
Now that the sweet potatoes are out of bed and cleaned, it’s time to cure them. Curing heals small scrapes and starts the conversion of starches to sugars, which improves the flavor. Sweet potatoes cure best in a friendly room (about 80°F–85°F) with high humidity for seven to 10 days. If this is hard to achieve, you can cure them at 70°F–75°F for two to three weeks, covering them with paper or cloth to help keep high humidity.
If the weather bands, you can cure them outdoors in a shady spot. If the weather is not right, an attic or shed might provide appropriate conditions. Nevertheless, you may need to boost the humidity with a humidifier or add heat to a space heater.
Storing Sweet Potatoes
After the sweet potatoes are perfectly cured, they will last six to nine months (although you energy use them up before that!). Place them in containers and store them in a dark space where temperatures stay between 50°F and 60°F. A cellar or cool closet often provides ideal conditions. Do not keep them in the refrigerator. Check the sweet potatoes regularly and clear any that show signs of rot.
- If your harvest was a good one, and you accept the time to cure and store them properly, you can appreciate this year’s sweet potatoes right up until it’s time to plant sweet potato mistakes for next year’s crop—three or four weeks after the last ice in spring.
Conclusion:
Also keep in mind that even though the whole fun in growing sweet potatoes is in digging up and showing off giant roots, you can—and should—eat sweet potato seeds of any size. Those very small “fingerling”-sized sweet potatoes are just as delicious.
The patience required in the timing of your sweet potato yield will pay off. September—or whenever you break out your evening sweater—will be here soon sufficiently! Then wait just a few more weeks for healing to maximize these roots’ sweetness. All via fall and winter, as you bring sweet potatoes out of hold for holiday meals and everyday meals. You’ll recall what you achieved in your vegetable garden last year.
Remember to watch the vines for a shift in color and the weather for an impending frost as the season comes to an end. These are signs that sweet potato harvest time has come. This well-planned harvest will set you up for a successful curing period and then hold. Your sweet potato casserole, stew, quesadillas, and muffins are as good as earned.
FAQs
1. How do I harvest and store sweet potatoes?
Harvest sweet potatoes directly before or after a vine killing frost. When harvesting sweet potatoes, troll carefully to avoid cutting or bruising the roots. Behind harvest, cure the sweet potatoes for 1 week at a temperature of 80 to 85°F and close humidity of 90 to 95 percent. Curing encourages healing of minor cuts and bruises, prolonging the storage life of the sweet potatoes.
2.How to Cure Sweet Potatoes
Ok so now we should have a pile of messy, fairly undamaged sweet potatoes at this point, exactly? The next stage is to cure them, which heals any bruises and increases their sugar range, a quality appreciated by those who prefer sweet potatoes without marshmallows
For excellent curing, leave them for 4-6 days at 80-85ºF in damp conditions with 90% humidity. Now personally, I do not have a space just like that in my house in mid-November, and I’m not about to jack the warmth up to roast us all alive… so the best these men are gonna get is an upstairs bedroom, which likely stays an overly toasty 70-75º during the daytime.