The day’s length has been officially surpassed, stealthily and abruptly, by night’s, and it’s time to celebrate Autumn’s relief during these final months of 2022! Our growing season is fading out, with the majority of our summer crops (peppers excluded) having appeared at last for curtain call and taken their final bows for the season.

Sweet Potatoes & Yams are unique and welcomed crops on our farm. They’re the sort of delicious, densely nutritional, storage vegetables a homesteader would be wise to grow. Theoretically requiring less input than their Irish friends, the harvest remains a big old dig- time consuming and physically demanding. Yams aren’t cultivated from a sprouted tuber like white potatoes. They’re typically started as cuttings or clones overwintered from the previous fall dig. The cuttings, or slips, are transplanted to the garden long after the threat of any spring frost has passed. New leaves sprout and the vine surveys the landscape, gripping and penetrating soft ground, sprawling out over the bed with leaves, stems, and eventually, beautiful shy purple flowers. The best thing to do to ensure big and numerous tubers is to give it a long summer, so you plant early and wait patiently for a harvest near, but not after, the fall frost.

As we’ve learned to expect and ought to get comfortable with, issues arose with this season’s yam crop- issues both anticipated and unforeseen. The crop had an ideal start, though. Our slips, purchased from another organic farm, arrived on time/early (they’re often delivered late) and we got them in the ground right away. In August, to our surprise, we noticed fully-formed tubers poking out of the soil way ahead of schedule. The yams just appeared early and easily, without the standard purple flowers that traditionally trumpet their arrival. While it was exciting to see the early fruit at the time, as we harvest, we are still awfully confused as to how or why one came without the other. We suppose we have further googling to do.

We’ve spoken before about the divergent emotions regarding the cathartic satisfaction or otherwise painful disappointment of a root vegetable harvest. A good harvest and high yield may be anticipated or even expected, but the truth is just under the soil surface or umbrella-ed beneath the crop’s canopy. You don’t really know until you dig and with Yams or Sweet Potatoes, you don’t want to dig too soon. So when we saw early fruit, we simply thought “Stay calm, this row is thriving, focus on other things, In October we’ll have an amazing yam harvest.”

Yams