How to grow sweet potatoes in straw bales - harvest loads of sweet potatoes without having to dig!

well good morning everyone it's Peter with the garden family and it is October 8th here in Southwest Ohio Zone 6A and today we're going to be harvesting sweet potatoes from the two straw bales that we planted our sweet potatoes in I'll briefly cover how we prepared the straw bells for planting how we planted the sweet potatoes and then we'll get right to the Harvest so let's go oh my gosh mother load look at [Music] that wow so there's two main reasons why I love planting sweet potatoes in straw bales so the first is that sweet potatoes love heat and you need to wait until the soil temperature is above 60° F prior to planting them the great thing about the straw bales is as you condition them basically start the composting process they heat up then they cool down down but generally you're planting in 80ish De F straw bales in late spring which is warmer than your soil temperature and the sweet potatoes love it so the second reason is just ease of harvest the sweet potatoes themselves as you will see grow in the straw bals and so in order to harvest them you just break the straw bals apart instead of getting out of shovel prior to being able to plant in the straw the straw bales need to be conditioned first it's basically just a fancy word for starting the composting process of the straw bales I won't go into a lot of detail on how to condition the Bales but basically it involves about a 2E period of adding High nitrogen fertilizer to the top of the Bales every other day and keeping the Bales moist to wet the entire time the Bales are going to heat up initially to about 140 to 160° F and then they'll cool down and generally once they're below about 90° F it's safe to plant the sweet potato slips in them you can Google straw Bell gardening if you want more details about that but if you want me to make a step-by-step video in the future let me know in the comments just like inground plantings of sweet potatoes sweet potatoes are planted as small plants rather than planting the sweet potato itself these little plants are called slips and they're made by taking an organic sweet potato and placing it either in water or soil and causing Sprouts to form off the sweet potato those Sprouts are then removed and planted either in water themselves or in soil and for straw Bell plantings we prefer planting the strips in soil so they have a little soil to plant into the straw Bell when we plant them with a Target outside planting date of miday we usually start our slips about the end of March to early April now to get the best Harvest of sweet potatoes they need a pretty long growing season and you want to keep them in the ground basically from when you plant them all the way up to your first Frost so these sweet potatoes were planted miday they've been in the ground really the straw bales for about 5 months and we had our first Frost this morning let's see what we get out of them so we have two straw bales one here one here that we're going to harvest from I've got some helpers coming with me first thing we're going to do is just remove all of this foliage and then uh we'll actually get in there and see what sort of sweet potatoes we get all right you guys let's start with this one we're going to cut these Vines back [Music] doing oh that those are heav those are def look look what they did I know there's so many of them huh I wonder if they grew down there too they definitely did like in those cuz sweet potatoes are supposed to go in the ground all right so it looks like we already have a few in here how many do you guys see so far I usually see like one two three four five six seven one we saw okay eight so you see eight well I bet you there's more inside no no nine okay let's get the camera up here and then we'll dig them out and see what we have so far I only 10 all right so let's get these strings off the straw bals here it is okay all right you guys start with that one you want to start in the middle yep all right here we go you guys oh wow look at that dad oh my gosh look it that's a big one all right this is going to be our first one right here okay careful not to break them oh my gosh mother load look at that wow that's how long they've been glowing look at that okay oh wow okay whoa I found another one wow another B okay hold on hold on whoa oh there's a big boy down here there's more wow look at this really big boy so one of the things that's so great is no shovels we're just digging through this straw let's see what else we have in here there's another one look at that one look at this big boy oh wa oh wait careful oh my gosh oh my gosh so many oh gosh all right we got one more we got one more patch patch to together no oh my gosh there's a big boy right here okay wow oh I knew there was a another load down here that was pretty good okay what do you got in there oh another mother mother load that's a there's a lot of mother loads here because they've just been glowing for so long let give this on Andy get it woo that's long potatoes those are long potatoes not fat potatoes all right yeah we're getting long not fat oh another leather load jeez La all right so one thing I want to show you is what this straw looks like afterwards so smells like soil kind of looks like soil mostly composted well there you have it this is our Harvest from two straw bales planted in May harvested today October 8th overall I think a really good yield we got some big sweet potatoes in here and a lot of smaller ones too but all a pretty decent size one downside I found this year at least is I did get a lot of sweet potatoes that sort of Twisted around each other and that meant during the Harvest you we got a decent amount of breaks on here cuz I couldn't really get them apart in theory that can sort of shorten the shelf life of them in storage so we'll use those first but straw bells are really are a great way to grow sweet potatoes these came out pretty clean too not a lot of mud no shovels the kids can come in and just help Harvest them we will be curing these in a warm location for a couple weeks prior to putting them in storage and we'll definitely be growing them like this again next year if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below I'll happily answer them for you and if you haven't already please consider subscribing happy gardening everyone

Channel: The Garden Family

Views: 167,395

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Id: E6zkc4szKow

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 08 2023