Noticed your plans to dig your sweet potatoes. How do you preserve them? Can, freeze, dry storage? This is my first year to get a few sweet taters and I need to dig mine also. Have been delaying the job because I’m not sure how to store/preserve them. Any ideas would be welcome!!!
Dig them, let them lay out in a shady spot (with no rain) for a day or so to ‘cure’, to harden up a little after you bring them out of the ground, and store them in a dry, dark place with good air circulation. Do not stack them, and check often for rot. One bad potato will spoil the whole lot.
Well I will attempt to describe... Use a potato fork and start a couple of feet away from the base of the plant, as the vines root out and can have sweet potatoes well away from the base. These won't necessarily be all that large but these small ones can be saved for next year's slips.
Sweet potatoes bruise easily and so once exposed carefully pull the soil away from them and lay them in an area away from where you are digging... Sweet potatoes also sunburn easily so keep that in mind as you dig them.
Gently rub any soil off them with your hands. I use thick cardboard shallow boxes that I can close the top to keep direct light away from the potatoes.
I store them in my laundry room as the furnace is there as well and the same temperature is maintained throughout the winter. And I just cooked up what sweet potatoes I had left from last year's harvest.
You can if you do not have the space, put the sweet potatoes in double line paper grocery bag and put under a cabinet to store as well. They need a warm (not hot) dry environment to store over the winter.
Oh do not wash the sweet potato until you are ready to cook as the water tends to make them rot.
Quick! Wash your ears out with this! Much more uplifting. Great music to weed by, LOL! You can really get the hoe swingin’ to this! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrPaEUjtYvQ&feature=related
I always can some of my sweet potatoes too. I rarely keep anything stored in only one fashion just in case something goes wrong somewhere. Dehydration is also a good method of preserving. Last week I took some dehydrated sweet potatoes and put them in the coffee grinder to make a powder, which I added to some pasta dough. The resulting noodles were fabulous and very pretty.