Harvesting Sweet Potatoes & Pulling Zinnias!
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FunTranscript
00:00 our dahlia patch. I wanted to start right here just to show you that we got our
00:03 first frost last night. 29 degrees when I woke up this morning and I just knew
00:07 that when I came out here things were gonna be looking a little bit sad. But
00:12 we're ready. I've got all the dahlias tagged. We'll do that here in the next
00:15 few days. We'll start the digging process but I always like to wait until the tops
00:19 get taken by a frost before we start digging. So anyway this is kind of the
00:23 state of affairs around here. I was driving around just like looking at all
00:27 of our annuals that lasted so long. It's the 27th of October today and we got to
00:32 enjoy beautiful color almost until November. It's just that amazes me. Every
00:37 fall is a little bit different but this one has felt like a gift. We have two
00:41 varieties of sweet potatoes we are digging today. They're out on the new
00:44 property and they look much like the dahlias. They got nipped with last night's
00:48 frost but that's what I wanted. I wanted one frost on those before we dug them.
00:51 And it should be fun to see how they did out there because I've never planted
00:56 well sweet potato well anything this was the first year we planted stuff out
00:59 there. Our potatoes did really well so hopefully the sweet potatoes did too. The
01:04 vines are vigorous and they just were growing everywhere so if that's any
01:08 indicator I think we'll find some good stuff. Oh look at that. What a glorious
01:14 morning. And what's even more glorious is that Gabe and Katie are on their way and
01:19 they wanted to help with some more garden stuff. So you know yesterday there
01:22 are friends from they traveled here from around the Seattle area. Yesterday
01:26 we planted 2,700 bulbs in the garden and they made the job really fun because you
01:31 get to visit the whole time and a lot faster. So today I thought sweet potatoes
01:36 would be a fun one and then getting some of those annuals up out of the ground.
01:40 It's almost kind of satisfying even though it's sad a little bit it's
01:43 satisfying to pull some of those big plants out. You'll notice Paul down there
01:47 he's cleaning out cosmos and marigolds. This is where we're gonna start. We've
01:51 got our artichokes which I've picked several from. Aren't they pretty? I wanted
01:57 to see what those would do. I love the look of that one. Touched by a bit of
02:02 frost with that little brown so I'm gonna cut those and take them in. Might try to
02:06 dry those in some silica gel sand. So right behind them we have the sweet
02:10 potatoes. Let's see what their vines look like. A little bit black. Sorry I've got
02:16 something from my I've got a dangly thing for my camera. I need to tuck that
02:19 back here. Sorry. So that's what they look like. You can harvest sweet potatoes
02:23 earlier than this. I usually like to wait till the first frost because they
02:26 continue growing. They continue sizing up under the ground until either this
02:30 happens or until the vine starts to yellow and die back which ours never did.
02:34 So I thought they're healthy and looking great let's just wait till the frost
02:37 takes them and then we need to get after it. You don't want to leave them in the
02:40 ground too long after the first frost. So it needs to kind of be priority on your
02:44 list. After we dig them today which we're gonna use a digging fork. We dig these
02:48 just like we do regular potatoes. We are going to clean them up just a little bit.
02:52 Not with water. We'll just remove as much of the soil as we can off of the tubers
02:56 and then to cure them which is a really important part. That's where a lot of the
03:00 sugars start to form and condense inside the sweet potato and also helps the skin
03:05 of the potato dry. So storage life is better. You want to put them somewhere
03:09 for about 10 to 14 days where it's roughly 75 to 80 degrees and slightly
03:13 humid. For me that means the studio where we've got a bunch of houseplants in
03:17 there it's already slightly humid in there. I can kick the heat up just a bit.
03:20 We usually keep it right at like 60, 970 anyway. So just for two weeks we'll keep
03:24 the heat five or six degrees warmer. After that we can put them in the root
03:28 cellar. So I think it's gonna work out really well. I'm excited. So the two
03:33 varieties of sweet potatoes I have. We've got one right here called Mayon. M-A-H-O-N.
03:38 A Mayon Yam. I'm probably saying that wrong and it's not an actual yam. Even
03:42 though yam is in the name of it. It is technically a sweet potato and they are
03:45 two very different things. I think that yams to my knowledge have a little bit
03:49 more of a rough skin and they have drier more starchy flesh than a sweet potato. I
03:54 don't know all the intricacies and ins and outs of that. The two I have are both
03:58 sweet potatoes. The other variety is Beauregard. The Mayon variety here has
04:01 pink skin and dark orange flesh. They say it's really moist and really sweet. That
04:06 you don't even need to add sugar because it's got such a high concentration.
04:09 That's the other benefit of leaving them in the ground till it gets a little
04:12 cooler. That does help send sugars to the tubers as well. The other variety we have
04:16 up closer to where Paul's working that those are Beauregard. They have
04:20 kind of a reddish orange skin with a dark orange flesh. They're really
04:24 productive typically sweet potato. So anyway I think all that said that's
04:28 pretty much all the information that I have on sweet potatoes. I you know
04:33 usually add biotone starter fertilizer when we plant those. Probably some land
04:37 and sea compost. After that they are heavy feeders. So you could feed them a
04:41 couple times during the season. Ours got one extra application of garden tone
04:45 which probably helped. But yeah they I could have fertilized a little bit more.
04:50 Here are all the things we're gonna be using. We've got digging forks. We've got
04:54 something to put the sweet potatoes in. I've got a kneeling pad. My gloves and
04:59 then I do have Falco's. I might remove foliage before I start digging that
05:03 might make it more clear as to where I need to dig. I'm just not sure. I just
05:06 need to get into it. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started and Gabe and Katie
05:09 are probably gonna arrive here really shortly and then you'll see them kind of
05:13 jump in and start helping. So anyway here we go.
05:18 (digging)
05:46 Okay so I started pulling back these vines. Look what I found right at the
05:51 base of one of our plants. A gopher run. Pretty fresh. Look at that. There's a worm.
05:58 Oh my gosh. There's another hole right in there. I don't know if you can see that
06:02 in there. Oh I hope they didn't eat my potatoes. Rotten gophers. Okay let's dig
06:11 this area up.
06:14 (digging)
06:42 (digging)
07:10 Oh there's one. Nice looking one. Another one.
07:18 (digging)
07:46 Oh man. Broke it.
07:54 (digging)
08:22 (digging)
08:48 Oh wow.
08:52 (digging)
09:20 (digging)
09:48 (music)
10:02 Okay there they are. All lined up single file on the leaf tarp. They fit
10:07 perfectly. So you know this process like I said they'll have a chance to dry
10:11 first of all. Our first batch is way drier and way lighter in color. My
10:15 goodness. After the curing period we'll just take a really soft brush and we'll
10:20 brush off all the excess soil. We'll check any of the ones that are cut like
10:25 that. A few of them just snapped in half and that happens when you're digging
10:28 sometimes because you have no idea where the potatoes are underneath the soil
10:32 surface. Those will probably come in even during the curing process and I'll snag a
10:37 few here and there and we'll eat those right away because those just will not
10:40 store as good as the other ones. So I'm really happy with this harvest. So
10:45 awesome. Now that that is done we're gonna go have a little break go grab a
10:49 coffee I think and then we're gonna come back and do a little bit of clean out in
10:53 the cut flower garden. We're gonna pull some of the zinnias I think that got
10:56 taken last night and just do some tidying up. So that should be a really
11:00 fun kind of relaxing. I like jobs like that because they're very tangible like
11:04 they look really good after you're done and it's kind of mindless at the same
11:08 time so that we can really visit and not really have to think about what we're
11:11 doing.
11:13 [Music]
11:15 [Music]
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11:21 [Music]
11:23 [Music]
11:26 [Music]
11:29 [Music]
11:31 [Music]
11:59 All right guys it's actually the next day but as you can see we did get all
12:03 the zinnias pulled and it did not take us very long. Boy you get three people on
12:07 it and it was done in like 30 to 40 minutes or so. There's Russell rolling
12:11 around in the nice puffy loose soil down there. Russell what are you doing? Come
12:16 here. Do you like the fluffy dirt? Hey buddy. Oh yeah look at you all dirty.
12:29 Whoa. So that was the 160 foot row and then one that's oh I don't know 20 feet
12:35 or so and then you can see what else we have left out here. The status even though
12:39 it's been down to 18 degrees. Status still looking really good. That's
12:44 beautiful part about growing sunflowers that just dry really well. They just look
12:49 like that. It's amazing. Redbeckia not so amazing. These are tender redbeckia. So
12:56 they're varieties that are labeled tender perennial which usually I mean
13:00 can mean there is on six seven eight something like that. Typically I don't
13:05 have the varieties that I have here come back for me. So that's why they're
13:08 planted in the annual section. So we are getting ready to pull those. I'm gonna
13:12 harvest status. When we pull those I'll harvest all of the good stems and then
13:17 we do have a couple other things that still look okay. Not the Nicotiana or
13:21 really the Larkspur which makes me sad. These self-seeded and they almost made
13:26 it. We had a crop this spring and then they dropped their seeds and then this
13:32 is what came up from them. The gonfrina we could still harvest a few of those
13:37 stems and the straw flowers as well. You can see the foliage looks horrid but if
13:42 you get in there you can find some blooms that still look okay. And the same
13:47 story with our Crespidia here. Some nice looking blooms. Everything else in this
13:53 section needs to be taken out. But it's nice that we were able to get a jump on
13:56 it. The zinnias I mean that was a huge section in this area so getting that
14:00 done was really nice. Anyway that is it for this video project. Huge thank you to
14:06 Gabe and Katie again for all their help in the garden. Thank you guys for
14:09 watching this video. Hope you enjoyed it and we will see you in the next one. Bye.