SUCCESS and FAILURES when Growing SWEET POTATOES

so good morning everybody we are out here this morning guys we've been through one heck of a drought here and when it's that hot and that dry i don't come out and fool with anything uh the grass and the weeds pretty much during those times really do take hope and what i'm doing is we had a we didn't hardly have any rain we had like 3 8 of an inch of rain but it's better than what nothing i can show you if i come here and i dig down see that we're dry see that right there i'm dry right down in there it's just powder so the three eighths of an inch was a blessing but it didn't do a lot down deep but i want to get the grass off of the tops of all this um now right next to the chicken pin here i'm probably not going to worry that'll probably just be weed-eated i'm gonna go through here and i'm just gonna pull the vines up and lay them up in the rows and then i'll just take the weed eater and run down through here and we need to edge that off because it's really not gonna do me any good to hoe it but out in the garden here i'm going to try to keep working my way over here the chamber bitters are so bad i mean they're coming up here like crazy but i can run the hoe right under the edge of the surface and get rid of them lay the vines back up in the rows these chamber bitters are everywhere i mean they're about a thousands and thousands here and all i can do is take the hoe and just go along and cut them off under the surface and i'm not going to get them all the first time around there's not any need me even freaking out trying to the chickens will love the grass when i throw it over there but i just go through and i just kind of like clean it up a little bit because we can ever get it where the sweet potato vines start growing because they've been sitting here in this drought not really doing a whole lot they're not dying but they're not really growing either just trying to just cut this stuff off right under the surface and then train our vines it's called training them now i rake this stuff up a little bit in a pile chickens love it and rather than get overwhelmed with everything i usually just jump back across because it looks like you've not really done anything i'll jump across and take these a little bit out here and there that way it keeps you from getting so overwhelmed it looks like you're not making any progress you can turn around and you look back behind yourself and you see progress because i may not i won't get the whole patch probably today because the heat will probably get to be too bad plus i get tired another thing but i will get a section of it done here at a time this is very important while these sweet potatoes is at this stage is to get as many weeds knocked down as you can because once they go to binding good now we got a little bit of moisture they will actually take off and they'll cover up a lot of this stuff and overpower it eventually see how quickly i've done like a 10 to 12 foot section here i've got two rows already done 10 or 12 foot rather than work my way down one long row i can continue to just work my way as i and go don't worry about your vines you're not going to hurt them they'll they'll be just fine there is a there is a process that um the old people used now i don't do it so much because i have plenty of uh sweep toe slips but back in the day when they had big fields that they wanted to plant once these vines got rooted out in the rows out here or you could come along here i'll give you for instance you can take like like this right here you can you can cut them off and pull these off of here but you need to make sure it's wet when you do that and i can come over here see i've got a couple missing right here where they just didn't take i'll take my hole and clean it up a little bit because i got to do it anyway and you can take them you can punch two holes in the ground you can actually take these stick them down in the ground come out here and keep them watered and you grow more sweet potatoes the old people did that when they had large fields and they didn't have enough draws to actually plant the whole field and the one thing when i'm using a hole out here and it's wet like this the dirt will stick to it and it just gets it gets heavy makes it hard to handle and it doesn't hold as well so i i usually keep my knife with me and do that kind of helps take some of the weight off of your arm it doesn't hurt because you can take some dirt up like this and you can lay it on top of your vines up here where you lay them back in a row they'll actually root right there and it'll help make your vine a lot more stable than what it is and sometimes you get a vine that won't lay in the row or anything like that and you can do that with it also to kind of help out a little bit getting it roofed good because you want to keep your vines on top of the rose as much as possible so that uh you go ahead and get the top of that row covered up because technically i could come back once i lay all the vines up in the tops of this i could take my cub tractor and i could come back with the sweeps on the back of it and i can plow these middles out once i lay all the vines up on top of the rose and that and i may do that uh it just it just depends on what it looks like when i get through with it after the hot sun hits it today i'll kind of see about how much uh how much of this in the middle's die because if i look back like tomorrow morning and there's a bunch of it still trying to pop up then i'll put the sweeps on the cub and i'll just come through here and i'll sweep the middles out and go ahead and get that taken care of and also i don't plant all of my sweet potatoes all at once i have like three patches of sweet potatoes they're all in different stages so that um we don't have to harvest all at one time and guys two if you're interested in growing sweet potatoes i have a uh we call it a manual i don't actually call it a book i call it a manual that i've wrote on our etsy store it tells you all about how we grow our sweet potatoes all the processes of doing it everything makes it really simple to grow them you uh it's not rocket science and they really really do really wonderful for those of you who uh grow in containers you don't have to grow out here in the field uh you can grow them in containers they'll do just as good if you'll keep them watered and um don't over fertilize them that's the one thing about sweet potatoes sweet potato is a root crop root crops need more phosphorus than they do anything else make sure your nitrogen is not not too high because if your nitrogen is too high you'll end up with all vines and no sweet potatoes guys we've been growing sweet potatoes for years this is not not nothing new for us some years are better than other years a lot of it has to do with rainfall you know how the weather is if it's too dry if it's uh it's too wet it can be too wet can be just as bad as too dry and i tell you what we'll do we'll uh we'll take you along on that journey and show you a little bit of some of our past harvests and some of our past sweet potato patches and stuff like that and show you some of the end results of of a successful harvest and maybe some of the results of years that we're not so good so let's go check out some of the other patches we've got we'll kind of show you what we're talking about with them being in different stages [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] so so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] oh guys i tell you what the cub tractor is such a blessing to us you know i just washed this over yonder look at that look at that the powder that fast just running it over here it's uh it's just that that and it rained yesterday that's crazy thing look at that pure dust guys this is two other rows we have over here that's of a of a different age i come through here this morning with a hoe and cut everything off of it i'm not going to plow the middles of it right now because it really isn't really that bad i got these two little rows right here over by the barn we just put them in different stages in different places guys we had a little bit of wind come through yesterday we got a couple of them here that uh you know this won't have to come out just it broke it off down at the ground i'll have to take it out of there feed it to the cows but i mean look at the ears already forming on this our ears are already starting to form up real good here it's looking really nice and one here up in here i mean these are doing really good two of them one coming out right under the other here's a really nice one right there another one coming out right here they're doing good and guys i'm over six feet tall and i can if you look way up yonder some of them is over 14 feet tall way up there i mean it's it's amazing uh but the wind didn't blow it down now we got a couple in here like this one here this one will have to come out this one here there's no need leaving this one see it broke off right there you know get it out of here and guys one thing i tell you the drought has done to the leaves here's another one here uh look at look at the leaves on it here see all this dead it's been so hot and so dry we had no rain for over a month and uh in 105 degree heat index temperatures every day the corn barely made it i mean literally if i hadn't spaced it out like i did uh we would it wouldn't have made it i did come in and uh i did put my water hose on the ends of the roads we have a rain catchment system over here i uh i let that completely empty out in here running it down the rows i think i did that three days in a row and plus i even took the other water and ran it over here just to try to salvage it from losing it and we had a couple here you know i think i showed y'all another video this one here i had to cut the top out of but the ears were still on it and there's enough tassels above it to pollinate it so i went ahead and took it you know the top out of it i mean it just it was bad and this week alone we have way over a hundred they said triple digits coming again for seven more days go guys we're not out of the woods yet uh we could still potentially not have as good a harvest as we need and we're just praying to the good lord above that we get some uh you know maybe an afternoon shower or something to without any bad winds or anything because what happens when you see the corn leaning overall like this what happens is this corn it takes a lot of moisture in that corn to keep that corn stiff and rigid and when it's that hot and the leaves are starting to roll up on it like these these rolled up quite a few times what happens is there's no moisture left in this stalk and this stalk is not rigid anymore it becomes soft and it begins to just lean over from the convenience of tall and the top being heavy it just leans over when that happens it takes a good bit of moisture and some good sun in the right ratio in order to pull it back up and stand it back up so it's a it's a really a touch and go situation when it's in this time of the year now i want to show you some of the roots we was talking about on these we've got these brace roots coming out way up here and then things are so sticky and i mean they are really trying to reach for some moisture we've got several of them in here all just reaching down for moisture helping to brace this corn off that's one of the things i bread into it i think that it's going to be a real big benefit for it it helps out a lot with it and you can see them everywhere on the corn they come out they'll come out another foot higher up on it this one's busting right there yep we have quite a few of them that the wind blew over on top of our uh trans beans here that uh you know probably we gotta pick tomorrow but we'll probably have to just pick from this side and reach through and hopefully the sun will try to pull them back up because believe it or not these things are just now starting to load up with blooms we went through such a long drought period we had no rain here we made a few good harvests on them but and i almost pulled him up i'm not gonna lie to you but i told one i said it's not hurting anything we just leave them and guys now they're coming back blooming looks like they're gonna put a second crop on guys we're in the remington uh greenhouse here and guys look don't you look this is my still sweet potatoes coming up in here i have planted hundreds literally hundreds of drawers from this tub of these red ones here and these are the white ones here um they're still putting on slips up here i mean i've done put out all i need to put out and look at some of them's actually running along in here all right guys this is our other patch of sweet potatoes here this is the first one we planted it's coming along pretty good i got it uh i took the cub and cleaned the centers out on it before they started running and they are beginning to do fantastic they're covering up the rows like they're supposed to now there's a few little pieces of grass here and there you'll see them in here a little crab grass sticking up in here a couple little weeds but we can go through here now and pull up a couple of the weeds out of it and pretty much the potatoes are going to cover it all up they're doing really good now part of these are red part of white we're just hoping for a really good harvest out of all of it all right guys this is the first row that i planted these are the white sweet potatoes here they have already started blooming i mean they are really kicking it now they're making taters is what they say when you see them blooming they're making taters and i noticed yesterday before the rain the ground was cracking up everywhere around them so that means that they're starting to put taters on and i mean i'm looking forward to a harvest now that's our uh and even since the rain look at how the ends are starting to stick up on them since it rained yesterday they got some moisture now i did run water down the middle of these rows two days in a row because they got where the sweet potatoes were starting to droop just a little bit so i did come in and run water down the middle of the rose for those two days and it really perked them up and i think that they're going to kick in now and they're actually going to start making really good potatoes here's what i was talking about right here see how the ground is starting to crack right there when you see that ground cracking like that they starting to make taters underneath there now these old chamber bitters here i'll i'll come out here one of these days when i'm get caught up and i'll sit here and i'll just go through here and pull these things out because it ain't nothing to pull them out it's just like by the thousands in there i'll chuck them over the fence where the cows are because the cows actually eat them the amazing thing is uh when the neighbors started building the pond right next door to me here i saw deer tracks all in the road out here and i was like oh my word they're gonna eat my sweet potatoes but you know we put the bone sauce out last year on the fence post through here the deer never crossed the fence and came in here like they did last year uh i don't know if it's still the bone sauce it's still relevant you know anymore uh but the thing about it is i went ahead and got a new batch from mr billy over at perma pasture farms just in case we start seeing something here we've had no coons no possums messing with anything no foxes we've had no deer we've had none of these creatures back in none of our gardens and guys i'm going to tell you what i monitor them daily and i am blessed and all i can attribute it to every year prior to that we've always been tore up by wild animals and only thing i can attribute it to is the bone sauce has worked i mean that's all i can say i don't know anything different to say i mean we've it's the first year that we've not had it and last year we put the bone sauce out so uh take it for what you want i'm a believer now now i do have a new batch if i see something starting to happen i will put it out because last year it worked like a charm so go check out mr billy over at perma pasture farms he sells this stuff over there he makes it himself he's got his own special how you say that his own special recipe for it and it's working so go check him out guys and thank you guys from deep south homestead okay guys a lot of people's asked me danny how do i know when my sweet potatoes are ready to dig one is the vines will actually start dying back secondly when you dig one of them up if you take your finger and you rub on it like this if you can't rub that skin off that's another sign that your potato is ready to dig if you dig it up and you start rubbing like this and the skin comes off of it it's not ready to dig so test your potatoes these are plenty ready the skins good and tough on them you can see not coming off these potatoes look at this that's a nice sweet potato our red sweet potatoes that was beside them here these were supposed to go all the way to the middle of october but with the intense heat that we've been having i've got this sneaky suspicion that these have been growing more than we thought and i really want to just take a opportunity and i want to check a plant now these are about 65 days right now if i'm not mistaken um maybe 70. and we're we're trying to determine should we go ahead and dig them or should we wait so i'm going to take and i'm going to sacrifice one plant to see what we get underneath this plant to see if this intense radiational type heat we're having has anything to do with the number of days to the harvest of the sweet potatoes so you all will see this with me as we do it i'm just i just randomly picked one here in the garden and you see they're still blooming there's blooms on them so usually that's a sign they're still making potatoes and they're still growing but um we're going to just dig one and see i'm going to just taking i'm just going to take them the ground's hard i know that i'm going to start on the outside edge here and kind of work myself in and get rid of these chamber bitters right here pull them up out of there we've got them things as a curse here now never had them before i'm going to just kind of start on the outside edge work my way deep up under this plant and we got one this size i mean not bad but yeah it can be canned that's for sure and oh look at this one now this is that's really what we're after right there i think it's time to sweet potatoes oh look at that and look at this this we ain't waiting look at that now something has i think you just broke that up i might have broke that yeah it's just fresh that's been broke off but you can see where they're starting to split the wood lice is uh they're splitting and you know they're starting to insects in the soil starting to get to them but this is this is what we got now i don't know if there's actually any more up under here or not but i don't think we need to wait uh i guess that's it i don't see any more but that's what we got here now to me that's not bad no that's some good potential some good potatoes right there um so what you say we just be digging sweet potatoes the whole fields awesome i think that the intense heat from the sun guys this is a field and we got another field down here that we knows ready and another field down below it i think um i think that the intense heat has played a part in this because you look i mean these are still these are still putting on blooms these things are not through growing i mean they're they're they're still going the only thing that bothers me is with all this tropical weather we got coming in here this weekend and all the rain will they rot or will they start sprouting because it's been so dry for so long i don't know we may we may dig a few plants just to see because this is just a random plant i just picked in the middle of the field out here and i think i'm gonna probably try a couple more plants just to see if it's consistent if it's consistent then i think we should probably focus on the rest of the week digging them if not then we'll leave them and we'll just let them go until after all the weather's over with so whoa okay we're going to push up on it see what we got here look at this good lord oh insects look i flip the holes oh we got well that's ants yes these are imported fire ants oh but look at this guys look at that i'd say they're ready i'd say we need to uh start focusing because that's good eating potatoes there perfect perfect and the ants are starting to get themselves starting to get them because the ground is so dry the ants are looking for some moisture uh and they're finding it in the potatoes see there's no moisture there's no moisture at all this is just pure powder i mean you look at this just powder so i mean my fork picks up through it i was going to check around just to see if i might we might have missed one on the edge or something okay guys we came down to our other sweet potato patch here the grass has took it over predominantly the plants are dying because of the heat and it's still you know it's just powder here y'all see the powder it's just dry but this is what we're finding what i was telling you about you see this here look at this as dry as it is the potatoes are just rotten in the ground so we've got to get in here even in this heat they're they're rotting we dug a few right here um i hit one good one here with the potato for it and stuck a hole through it um broke it off but it was uh it was a good potato we got a few more they're sticking around here in different places you know this to us is about the best eating sized potatoes we don't want them we're not really interested in the big old giant ones because they're too hard to cut up they're usually stringy this is the size we really like to eat right here we are in our sweet potato patch we've had tons and tons of rain uh the weeds just took over we have decided it's like 160 something days now we're pulling the weeds to feed to the turkeys and the chickens florida the florida pussley the uh sweet potato vines will go to the pigs and then we'll of course we'll be keeping the sweet potatoes ourselves but we're going to try to see if what we can get done here this morning before the sun gets up and gets too hot uh one thing we noticed we stuck our sweet potato vines i think too deep in the ground and our sweet potatoes are extremely deep and that we're wondering if that wasn't part of our problem this year with uh being able to grow them like we normally do because normally we have them up on high mounds and this year because of the weather we weren't able to do that [Music] this dirt it's been raining rain and raining and the ground is still dry up under here it's amazing to me how dry it is out here in our potato field look at this guys this is how far tree roots will grow trees are probably 50 to 75 feet over yonder we still got oak roots out here in our garden [Music] perfect eating sized potatoes right there they're not too big not too little perfect [Music] do [Music] we just got through uh going through our last sweet potato patch on the hill over there we planted about a quarter of an acre had roughly around 600 sweet potato draws planted over there and our thinking was if we got one pound per draw at least we'd get 600 pounds of potatoes well guys um that didn't happen the weather changed on us it started raining just relentlessly for weeks on end the grass came up in the potato patch we tried to get it out but it was just too much the ground was wet we couldn't put a tractor in there and plow it so what happened was we ended up with the grass being about waist deep which is about three foot deep or a little deeper than that and it just took over the whole field and we knew once that happened we really just have to wait until the end just to see if we got anything but wanda and i just finished this morning digging and what you see sitting right here beside me is 75 pounds of potatoes out of a quarter of an acre now there's some reasons what happened here first was the weather it was so rainy that up underneath that grass in the dirt the ground never dried out and lots of what we would dig we would find big old potatoes but when you would touch them your fingers would just mush into them because they were rotten they completely rotted and then as i was going with through the grass and i had to take the bucket to dig these things we could you couldn't do it by hand i just take the bucket and go down one of the rows and scoop up about four foot a row and back up and just scattered all over the ground and dig the potatoes out of all the grass and the dirt and stuff and what we were finding was rats because the grass was so deep the rats had moved in now we have some signs of some things here i want to talk about uh first off we thought we were breaking a lot of potatoes off because i was like man i'm doing so much damage with my bucket because we'd find pieces of potatoes but when we got to looking like a potato like this we thought well we're breaking them off no they've been eat off by the rats even look at this one here we were finding them with slips growing on them and i was like what in the world and i got to looking right here the whole end of the sweet potato has been eat off by rats and it was cut loose from the mother plant so it done what it does naturally it's a potato and it starts putting out slips that's how you get slips from potatoes to plant so we begin to find that and not only that we find here's another one here this is fresh sign this one was just eaten and because there was so much water you see these big old cracks in the potatoes these are just like tomatoes or anything else when it's been dry and then all of a sudden it just starts raining these potatoes started growing so fast they started splitting busting up all on the sides i mean they just look horrendous now they're still good but then we would find one like this one here you see that another one the rats has just eat the top completely out of it they know the potato is still good we'll just have to cut that part off but that's what we begin to find and i had some here uh one like this one here but we have what's called wood lice here it's it's it's just an insect that's in the soil it mainly feeds on wood products but sweet potatoes so closely resemble a piece of wood that these lights in the ground these little almost like a termite but they're not a termite they're almost like in the family of it they come in and they just burrow little tunnels all around through these potatoes everywhere and they just leave you with a with an ugly looking potato you know it just looks horrendous we'll peel out and get what we can out of these on my last porch time was a simple fact that size really doesn't matter not other does quantity now we're not going to fret because of this because we still have our purple sweet potatoes to go and we still have a row of white sweet potatoes to go now i don't know if if the purple ones are rotten i have no way of knowing unless i just go out there and just dig one up but we only have like two small beds of them and i really don't want to ruin the fact if they're doing good because there was only just a just a two two small beds of them and we don't want to lose them if they're still growing i can't afford to waste a plant i run my fingers down the ground around them and it feels like they're okay but between these the purple ones and the white ones we're hoping to get a decent harvest but the guys we were expecting around six to seven hundred pounds minimum this year and what we ended up with was 300 pounds by the time we figured what we picked out of our bottom field and now this top field so far we're only at 300. now if the purple ones pull out in these two beds and the white ones and they make enough to bring us up some then that's one thing but guys this is why we plant as much as we do because you have no control over the weather you have no control over what mother nature does or the wildlife or anything like that there was one point that the deer came in and eat one whole end of the field off down there they eat all of them off before the grass and the rain actually come we actually have video of my neighbor tilling that field for us when we were getting ready to plant sweet potatoes you couldn't even see him on a tractor because it was so dusty and we figured oh my gosh these things will never live but we poked them in the ground and they flourished because there was enough moisture deep in the ground after we broke the ground up that they were able to get some moisture and they started taking off and we thought wow we're going to actually be able to get some good potatoes because it started raining a little bit but then came the fire ants the fire ants began to build beds in that field everywhere and then the rain just kept coming and the ants just trying to kept trying to get up out of the ground building more beds and more beds and then the grass took over and the ants were building all up in the grass and there was just no way guys then the rats moved into the grass and it was just beyond our control at that point and so we just did what we could do like we talked about on porch time last week sometimes you just have to do what you can do now we're you know we keep these small ones like this a lot of times we usually just feed these to the animals but this year we'll be taking these kind right here and we'll be washing them and clean them up good and we'll be quartering them up and that's what we'll make our fries out of to eat sweet potato fries now we do have a small corner of the bucket over here we picked up some of the little tiny roots and stuff like that and that's going to go to the pigs because we don't waste anything if we could see it in the field we picked it up threw it in the bucket just simply because we don't feel like that it's right to just let stuff if we know it's there waste and be of no benefit to anything so we tried our best to gather up everything we could just so we would benefit as much as we could from our labor so guys this is one of the things we wanted to bring y'all and show you that even though i grow sweet potatoes every year and they're fantastic the weather this year has just been horrendous here we've got rain up to two and three weeks at a time non-stop all these tropical systems are coming in here low pressures are forming off the gulf down here water just keeps getting dumped day after day after day after day and then the relentless humidity and the heat comes in our heat indexes stay up in 100 degrees most days and it's it's not always cracked up to be to try to be a homesteader and try to raise your own food now wanda and i thank god had canned some sweet potatoes last year and we still have a few left over to add to these this year because guys by the time we can 300 pounds of sweet potatoes and keep some fresh to eat that's going to be pushing the limit about making it to next season and having to do without sweet potatoes i know that it's not always roses and everything you know it's not always good but sometimes on a homestead you have failures and in our eyes this is almost a failure but we still have something to eat so we're not going to look at it as a failure we're going to look at it like god blessed us because it could have been worse we could have lost all of it but because god was good to us and let us get what we need right now to get this stuff preserved we feel like we've been blessed so don't get discouraged when you have these problems and guys let me say this in the couple in the years to come what you're seeing right here is just going to get worse because they're talking about different insects are now being found in our country in different locations in our country that have never been here before there's insects killing timber there's beetles in places in the united states killing the timber that's never been there before the lots of the trees are dying from the tops down crops are dying insects are just horrendous this year the weather there's flooding there's drought lots of places in the country they don't even know if they're gonna have hay for their cattle because there's just been no season for growing anything lots of places in the country the corn has just been lost the wheat has been lost to flooding guys this is only the beginning of sorrows so when you see something like this and you have an opportunity to preserve and you have an opportunity to grow your stuff i beg you learn and get busy because it's only going to get worse in the upcoming years so guys i know this is not an upbeat video but it's a positive video because we're giving god the thanks for giving us what we do have could have been worse so keep a positive attitude and thank y'all from deep south homestead you

Channel: Deep South Homestead

Views: 175,235

Keywords: sweet potato plant growing, sweet potato slips, how to grow sweet potatoes at home, how to grow sweet potatoes slips, sweet potato diseases, sweet potato plants, pests in sweet potatoes, watering sweet potatoes, too much water in sweet potatoes, drought and sweet potatoes, drought solutions, tips for growing sweet potatoes, sweet potato hacks, growing sweet potatoes from slips, sweet potatoes in containers, growing sweet potatoes slips in containers

Id: 7vISn4_0uQY

Length: 45min 54sec (2754 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 20 2022