Digging Up & Curing Sweet Potatoes

Let’s walk through how to dig up & cure sweet potatoes!

In our back garden update this year, I wrote about converting a 15×15 patch of grass to growing space, primarily to grow asparagus. But we had a third row that was up for grabs, and I decided to do sweet potatoes. I find that root veggies are often easier to grow and dig up in raised beds, but my mom gave me her extra slips (which are what sweet potato starts are called).

I figured, why not pop them in the new in-ground beds? The soil needs a lot of improvement, so I didn’t know what to expect…but wow, they did great! So let’s walk through digging them up and harvesting them.

Step 1: Locate roots & trim foliage

As you can see in the pics, sweet potatoes can really take over a space. My plant’s vines grew so far out of the growing row I put them in that, by the end of the season, we were just walking through them like a little sweet potato forest.

To get started, I watched the forecast and picked a day to harvest when I saw that we were nearing a danger of frost. I began by cutting away all of the leafy vines. This took longer than I thought it would because, as the vines spread, they will throw down more roots that stick into the ground.

These generally won’t develop into anything, but they can make removing the vines a bit harder. I was able to cut away all of the vines in about 30 minutes or so. And once the vines were gone, I could easily see where the main stems on my plants were.

The stems has gotten so thick, it is pretty incredible to see the changes a plant can make in just a few months! You also may notice some sweet potatoes growing partially or completely aboveground. This is fine—those will just be easier to harvest 🙂

Step 2: Dig up carefully

To get started, grab a shovel or small trowel. It’s better to use a trowel so you can work more carefully. But a lot of the in-ground soil in these new beds was still somewhat hard to dig, so I used a shovel to begin digging. Then I brought in a trowel for more precision work.

I recommend digging out farther than you think you need to dig out. If you dig too close to the main root, you will hit a tuber and cut it in half. I thought I was going out far enough from the main root, and I still cut a few giant tubers in half by accident.

So I recommend loosening the perimeter of soil with a shovel and then going in with your trowel to find the individual tubers. They are pretty fragile, too, so don’t use your hands to pull them out of the ground until they are sufficiently loosened. They’ll probably snap.

Step 3: Cure your potatoes

The need to cure sweet potatoes stopped me from growing them for a while. I was intimidated by extra step…but it’s a necessary step! Curing helps convert the starches in sweet potatoes into sugars, making the them sweeter. It can also toughen their delicate skin, making them more shelf stable for storage.

You just need to keep them around 80 degrees Fahrenheit in high humidity (80% or so) for a week or two after digging them up. My cousin Jimmy achieves these conditions in his basement by stacking his sweet potatoes in crates with a seedling heat mat and bowl of water. He then covers the whole apparatus with a blanket to trap the heat and moisture in.

I used a little wire greenhouse with a plastic cover to cure mine. I set a glass of water in the little greenhouse and kept the plastic cover closed. While it didn’t stay consistently over 80 degrees with nighttime temperature dips, it did get super hot and humid during the day.

Oh—and don’t wash the sweet potatoes before or after curing! After curing, you can brush some of the excess dirt off. But don’t wash them off until you’re ready to cook with them.

Also, you can see in the first photo on the left below…the tubers I accidentally sliced in half with my shovel, I still saved and cured those! Those will be the first we eat, though. I’ll store the rest down in a box in our basement and see how long they last.

We already ate one of these sweet potatoes, and although I’m not a huge sweet potato fan, I have to say—things really do just taste better when you grow them 🙂

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