I have dug the ones in my front bed, very poor harvest. I did however dig them with the tractor and missed many of them. My oldest daughter is coming over Wed. to dig the ones in my garden. They were planted later and really needed this month to grow. I have had more rain this summer than I can ever remember and I have more vines than anything else.

I have In-laws in Mena AR. that had frost night before last. They are about 50 miles south of me so I expect I could ne getting frost anytime now, even though the average frost date is near the end of Oct.

Larry

I occasionally think about digging mine, but they I decide to let them grow on for a while. I didn't plant them until June because I was waiting to get all my Irish potatoes dug so I could replant that area with the sweet potatoes. Since voles invaded the garden en masse in 2011, I can only grow root crops in beds lined with hardware cloth, and so far we've only lined two of the existing beds with the hardware cloth to exclude the voles. I hope to get several more of the raised beds dug up, lined with hardware cloth and then refilled with the amended soil sometime between now and the upcoming winter planting season so I'll have more vole-free space for root crops. Onions are the first root crop I plant in late winter, and my usual time to plant them is around mid-February, so that should leave us plenty of time to vole-proof some more of the raised beds.

I don't intend to dig my sweet potatoes until sometime after mid-October, and maybe not until the end of October. My first autumn frost normally is around mid-November, and both our soil temperatures and air temperatures still are pretty warm right now so I'm not getting in a hurry to dig potatoes yet. It got pretty cold at our mesonet station (33 degrees) yesterday morning, but only went to 42 at our house and didn't stay that cold for long. My soil temperatures still are in the mid- to upper-70s and on a hot sunny day even can hit the 80s so the plants still are really happy and growing well. If they were looking sad and pathetic or turning yellow, I'd go ahead and dig the sweet potatoes now. I almost never dig them until November though.

Dawn

I dug a bunch up this afternoon that I had missed, and had a decent crop this year. This is in a new area that I didn't expect much from, but had added a lot of leaves to the clay soil over the winter. Got a nice crop of Yukon Gold earlier from rows nearby.However, the combination of sweet potato vines and watermelon was too much.

I started digging some last week, maybe around Thursday. But I only dug three plants. The harvest looked very promising.

Yesterday I dug about 8 more plants and got about a bushel of sweet potatoes. These were all Oklahoma Red, a very nice variety, developed at Oklahoma State University by Dr. Cordner, I believe. It is supposed to be especially suited for heavy soil.

I received my first start of this from Sandhill Preservation Center. After a couple of years I lost it because I stored my sweets on the sun porch and the winter was so cold that it damaged them. Last spring Gary (duckcreekfarm) sent me 13 slips. These were the last ones to go into the garden, on June 2. They produced very nice size roots!

One thing I have observed with this variety is that when it is growing in really hard soil, it will send out lateral roots which get very long and stay quite skinny. When planted in softer soil those long skinny roots hardly appear. It grows a normal cluster of roots, mostly right under the plant. This year I experimented. I planted half of this variety in a tall hill and the other half straight in the ground, with no hilling at all. I had some skinny lateral roots in the planting straight in the ground, and almost none in the tall hill.

George
Tahlequah, OK

George those do look very nice. I hope to dig Beauregard on Wed.. We got another 1.75" of rain last night. everything I have dug this year was from soil that was too wet.

Larry

I wish I could grow sweet potato's with that many on them. If mine have 2-4 good potato's on a plant I am happy. I am certainly no expert but I am convinced that sweet potato's generally do better if they are grown on a little bit of ridge. Of course this is old school thinking but I learned from my Grandpa who did it that way. My soil is sand but I make a little ridge for sweet potato's anyway.
Are Oklahoma Red any thing like the old Porto Rican sweet potato's?
I live in east central OK. so It is not supposed to frost before the 15th of Oct. but it has frost on the 13th in the past. I planted my sweet potato's in June - through the 1st of July so mine really could use another month of warm weather and a little moisture to make.
Thank you all for your reply's and the pictures.

Larry, Well, this time I got rain overnight too, though only about half as much as you got. So, any plans I had for doing anything in the garden today are postponed because the rain fell after 4 am and the garden was soggy wet and muddy this morning. With the heat and humidity, at least the mosquitoes will be having fun out there.

Auther, You never know. Maybe your first freeze will be late and you'll be able to leave your sweet potatoes in the ground a bit longer. Or, you could cover them up with a heavy blanket if just one cold, frosty night is forecast. Often, down here in southern OK, we'll have that first cold, frosty night and then we'll get another 4-6 weeks of nice, warm and almost-perfect weather before it actually gets cold again. So, if I can protect plants on the first cold night, then they get to grow for a whole lot longer.

I've left mine in the ground and had their foliage frosted before because I didn't cover them, but the potatoes themselves were fine. Sometimes, if sweet potatoes are exposed to weather that is too cold, they spoil easily and don't last as long in storage....but that hasn't been an issue for me here in OK. Usually, my soil temperatures are still very warm when the first frost hits, and I think that helps the sweet potatoes shrug off the frost. After they have frosted, if all the foliage is blackened, I immediately cut it off and throw it on the compost pile (where the deer will eat it as soon as they see it) and then sometimes I harvest the sweet potatoes right away, but other times I've left them in the ground another week or two after the frost and then dug them, and they were fine.

Dawn

I dug my very first sweet potato on Saturday with my grandson. We were both thrilled and then he spent 30 minutes burying and finding it again. We only took one potato but it was a decent size. not sure when he will be back and didn't want him to miss the excitement. I think I will wait till the end of the month and dig the rest. The plants are still looking great.
kim

I went ahead and dug the rest of my sweet potatoes today. My oldest daughter was going to come over before work and dig them Wed., but I hated for her to do that so I took my time and dug them myself.

I will try to show and tell some of the things I noticed. The plants were planted in about a 100 sq. ft. area, but the vines covered a much larger area. My grand daughter made about 30 cuttings from the potatoes in the front lawn (Beauregard) and planted them in the garden, about 27 or 28 lived, but not all produced usable roots. The production was much better than I thought it would be, but much less than it should have been. A few plants only made long skinny roots, I also had a lot of rotten potatoes because it has been so wet this year.

This is my total harvest of usable roots from the garden. I expect that there may be 80 or 90 pounds in the cart.

The potatoes were planted in 3 short rows, some where I had my cole crops planted, some in an area I had planned to plant cow peas. The potatoes did much better in the "Pea" area. The rotted potatoes and the skinny potatoes were in the more amended soil, but all my soil was too wet.

The best producing plant was in the less amended soil and produced 14 pounds of potatoes (per bathroom scales)

I had several potatoes damaged from mice or rats but I did not see any damage from gophers.

I also found some larva that I am not sure of on this rotten potato.

Larry

Mr. Slowpoke I am impressed at your sweet potato crop. I happen to like Beauregard, but then I just like sweet potatoes. I believe sweet potatoes like cowpeas both grow better in poor soil. Sweet potatoes aren't wet soil crops as they tend to do well in dryer conditions but a wagon load of sweet potatoes will take a while to eat. I don't know what I would do with that many as I don't have any where to store them. The rotten potato looks like it has some kind of maggots on it could they be from what was planted there before the sweet potato's. I have trouble digging too, but you don't have to dig all of them all in one day. It used to be that I could do something in an hour or two now takes me 2-3 days and I do as much sitting as I do working. Some days I mess around and do a little to much and then it takes me a couple of days to recover. I don't like for someone else to do it for me as sometimes they don't do it to suit me the way I want it done. Gripy I guess.

Author, I don't remember the Puerto Rico variety well enough to compare with Oklahoma Red. Also, I am embarrassed to say it, but I was happily digging two more plants of "Oklahoma Red," when I noticed that they were WHITE FLESHED. Yikes! Suddenly it occurred to me that I had plowed on through the Oklahoma Reds, dug up six plants of Cordner Red, and was now digging Japanese Purple, which is white fleshed. The picture I posted is most likely Cordner Red. Now I have to go back through my harvest and re-select my "seed potatoes," for Oklahoma Red, for next year. I'm pretty sure what I had set aside contains some Cordner Reds!

Gary Schaum (duckcreekfarms) might be able to compare Puerto Rico to Oklahoma Red. He probably grows it.

George

Mr. George @ Macmex, I couldn't help but to smile at your story about digging into a different sweet potato variety. That sounds like something that I would do.

We harvested our Beauregards today. These plants spent 2 months in awful soil that didn't drain. They didn't grow at all. I moved them to bags and pots July 24, so this is not a bad harvest for 2 months of growing. There were maybe 6 plants all together. Another month of growth and we would have done pretty well.