I know it is hard to wait for sweet potatoes but you should wait until fall to harvest them.  You can wait until the first frost hits but then you better start digging. I just harvested mine last week. Please be careful because sweet potatoes bruise easily. If you recall, I am growing sweet potatoes in grow bags that I made this year. Instead of digging, I dumped the grow bags out on a tarp and harvested the sweet potatoes. While I had less bruised potatoes, I think I got larger sweet potatoes when I grew them in raised beds the prior year.
I gently brushed off the loose soil. To cure the sweet potatoes, I usually place them in a warm spot inside the basement or garage. We have two single car garages, one is closer to the heater in the basement so I cure the potatoes in that one for about two weeks on a rack. After two weeks, I will store them on a moveable rack in the other garage where it is cool and dark. When I stack them, I put a piece of burlap in between.   If you cure them properly, you can keep them for a long time (possibly a year). Since we love sweet potatoes, they won’t last long once they are cured.  In fact, we are usually done eating them over the holiday season.
I can just taste the sweet potato fries! This blog is making me hungry.
If you recall, I was trying to grow the sweet potato vine vertically up on the fence surrounding the garden. This is a good idea in general but I should have grown the vines up a trellis inside the garden because the deer took a liking to the sweet potato vines and mowed them down. Good news is that I still got sweet potatoes! I am not sure if this impacted their size too.
Don’t forget to do a search in my blog for “Sweet Potatoes” so you can learn more about growing them.
