Sweet potato harvest

The long wait is over.  I read in multiple places that you can leave the sweet potatoes in until the first frost kills the leaves.  They all make a point in saying "but if you do that, you need to take them out of the ground within a day of the frost.  As the leaves die, the bacteria will follow the vine into the sweet potato".   

But after watching the leaves on a daily basis, I noticed that even though we have not had a frost, some of them started to turn yellow, and the yellow was even moving down some of the stems.  

So that was it. It was time to pull up the sweet potatoes!   While the overall harvest was not as large as I had hoped, I guess it is still OK for a first try.  A few of those tubers are 2 or three times the size of my fist!

Here they are getting ready for the curing process (under our bed):

So the whole process goes something like this:

1. Dig up sweet potatoes when the leaves start to yellow and die back.
2. Leave them out in the sun for an hour or so (if you can) to dry the dirt so it is easier to scrape off.  
3. Gently rub off as much dirt as you can, but be very careful not to strip any skin off the tuber. Each blemish makes it so that the potato will not last as long in storage
4. Store the tubers in a dark 70-85 degree room, with as close to 85% humidity as you can get for 5-10 days.  
1. Our bedroom is around 72 degrees right now, but nowhere near 85% humidity
5. After the curing, store them at around 55 degrees, again in a dark place 
1. We have nowhere that is this temperature, so we might need to cook, cube, and freeze the potatoes at some point in the next month or so.   

Lessons learned:  I think that next year I will try putting down black plastic, or weed blocker fabric over the bed before I plant the sweet potato slips.   You make little slits only where the slips will go into the ground.  The benefit of this is that the vines will not be able to reach back into the ground and zap energy away from the main plants.   When I pulled up the vines this year, there were lots of places where the vines had fused to the ground, and a lot of energy was wasted on tiny little sweet potato vines that never plumped up.