Sweet like Christmas

Today had a little touch of Christmas morning in it...

We harvested our sweet potatoes!

Sweet potatoes are, in my opinion, the most fun crop to harvest by far.  It's like finally finding out what's inside that special present you've been anxiously waiting to open.  

This year's sweet potato crop grew from volunteers (bits of sweet potato that we must have accidentally left in the ground from last year), and from a few tiny roots from last year's crop that sprouted in my pantry where they had been stored.  Pretty sweet to have spent $0 on our crop.

Here you see the dying sweet potato vines (you know it's time to harvest once the vines have died), and our sweet Silas who got a front row seat to the harvesting show:

What will we find under the ground this year???

Well, Vera found lots of worms, slugs, and roly polies.  

The rest of us found quite a handful of sweet potatoes.

(this was a medium sized potato)

We were SHOCKED at how HUGE our sweet potatoes were!

This one took both William and Vera's strength 

to lift out of the hole!

I like that in this picture you can see one of our chickens walking on the fence behind Vera's head.

Our crop!  

You may or may not know, but Justin is a bit of a "Numbers Guy."  He couldn't let these beauties go without being weighed.  The verdict?

Largest sweet potato: 8 lbs.

Total crop: 110 lbs.

Pretty SWEET! 

William (4 years old) is loving taking pictures and videos lately.  Here is his video of the sweet potato harvest if you're interested.