Sweet Potato
Disregarding the debris and soil on the right side of the above photo, our sweet potato patch looks extremely healthy and has for a long while now. So when my eldest daughter home from college wanted a sweet potato to try out a new recipe, I told my wife we should dig one up just to see what they look like. We raised some once many years ago at our garden at the farm but the entire crop had amounted to just a handful of smallish sweet potatoes. I don't recall our plants above ground every looking this vigorous as the ones above do this year so I was optimistic that our luck had changed.
What we found underneath the one plant we chose to sacrifice early astounded us. We found a dozen sweet potatoes under that single plant and every single one of them was bigger than our biggest sweet potato we have grown the previous time. They also weren't purple skinned as they should be. We bought the slips this spring and they had been labeled Japanese Murasaki sweet potatoes which according to the picture on the display and subsequent internet research all showed purple skinned sweet potatoes with a white creamy flesh. Since the sweet potatoes can potentially still grow and mature another six to eight weeks before harvest, perhaps they will turn purple later. Or perhaps they were simply mislabeled.
The black plastic tub they are in is about bushel basket sized but it is still hard to get a scale of them without knowing exactly how big a bushel basket is so I picked up one and held it for a selfie below to give my readers a sense of scale. Now, I have six weeks to ponder just exactly what we are going to do with all those sweet potatoes.
Dems no small potatoes.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to have to make a lot of friends later this fall. There is no way I'm going to eat all those sweet potatoes.
DeleteYeah, those look like plain ol' sweet potatoes to me, as opposed to the Japanese variety. But that is not a bad thing! I love sweet potatoes, especially around the holidays.
ReplyDeleteThey have tasted really good thus far so I don't think it is a bad thing either only that I don't know what variety I do have if we plant them again next year.
DeleteOh yum! I love sweet potatoes. It looks like you will be eating Sweet potatoes for a long time!
ReplyDeleteAlthough I've had a few over the years, I haven't been a big consumer of them so will have to learn how to use them in dishes.
DeleteI wonder if they were mislabeled? They seem to look like "regular" ones to me. I like sweet potatoes, but don't want them any larger than the one shown in your hand. They get too fibrous when they get big!
ReplyDeleteOn a side note, I check your side bar for blogs I don't have on my roll and it appears yours is not updating. I have three posts on my secular blog and two on my faith blog since what's shown there!
I think they were mislabeled too. It wouldn't be the first time from the place where we bought them.
DeleteYes, blogger reading feed seems to be permanently broken now and as far as I know, no solution. It started causing issues a couple weeks back but would periodically show new posts a couple days after they were posted. Now however, nothing works so I have to manually go check every blog looking for an updated post.
Of course I make things hard for you in that I might post three days in a row on my faith blog then not again for a week or more! I pretty much post every 2 to 3 days at the other. My next review (on Thursday) is non-fiction. If you haven't already read it, you might like it.
DeleteOH WOW!!! Those are huge! I am very impressed. Yes, murasaki is Japanese for purple. I especially know this since my grandfather wanted my mom to be named Violet. It’s always been a favorite color for me. I don’t often see sweet potatoes this big. I liked to cube and roast them.
ReplyDeleteMy wife being Filipino, prefers the purple sweet potatoes which is why we attempted to grow Murasaki. However, I think the store switched them. Those hoping for regular sweet potatoes are probably just as surprised as I am!
DeleteThose are gigantic! My older daughter cooks a lot with sweet potatoes; they are very versatile.
ReplyDeleteThey were never a part of my diet growing up. I remember maybe the odd sweet potato pie but that is about it. Thus far, we have just roasted them with other veggies but we will need to expand our use of them once we harvest.
DeleteI like sweet potatoe and yours look awesome! Have you ever tried french frying them...in an air fryer or in the oven? Very good!
ReplyDeleteMy wife has a time or two and I enjoyed them but the kids did not.
DeleteThey look great! Any chance they are volunteers?
ReplyDeleteThis was the first time planting sweet potatoes in this garden so they aren't volunteers. We bought the slips at a bulk good grocery store close to the farm known for such things and they have accidentally mislabeled things before so I suspect that happened this time. The worst part of it all is they are tasty and evidently vigorous for this soil and growing climate so I would grow them again if I only knew the variety!
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