That's what we're looking at too. Let's hope some water and cooler temps plump them up a bit. Mine are growing in water troughs....because the gophers/mole eat more than we do. I'm hoping the black plastic outside didn't stunt their growth too much.

We haven't started digging yet. It's been such a strange year in the garden. I'm almost afraid to look! I have already put out rat poison in the gardens. I had so many rodents in the garden, where my sweets are growing, that I not only noticed digging there, but the critters were also climbing my trellis' and eating shelly beans right out of the pods!

George
Tahlequah, OK

That's discouraging, George. We haven't noticed any activity in our garden, but both cats spend a lot of time out there.

Dorothy, that looks like a large sweet potato plot. Do you remember how many your planted? Hope you get lots.

Carol, Yes, we bought starts from George. 3 each of 6 varieties for 18 total. George threw in one extra but one died so 18.

There were not only tubers right under the main stem but under the weed matting 2 and 3 ft away. And with the 8 ft fence the deer didn't get to them this year.

WOW, looks like you are going to get a good harvest. I think I planted 7 but the vines have run 6-8 feet in all directions. My vines have looked really healthy except the day after I removed my cucumber vines which were providing some shade for the SP. They recovered after one day. My ornamental sweet potatoes have gone crazy this year also and I keep cutting the vines back that are crawling over my path. The chickens love the leaves.

I just noticed I said we were going to wait a couple weeks, but obviously we only waited a few days.

Dorothy, It looks like you'll have plenty of sweet potatoes. Hooray for the fence! I'd say 'poor deer' but I don't have much sympathy for garden-destroying deer. I'm sure they survived the summer even without feasting upon your garden.

Dawn

No doubt as we've had plenty of rain this summer. But we did last summer too when they destroyed so much of my summer garden by repeatedly eating it back.

Dawn, people keep warning us that 8 feet will not keep them out for long. But I believe you said that 8 feet is what you put up. How long has that worked for you?

I harvested my sweet potatoes this morning. The deer have eaten them back several times this summer. I harvested 8 plants today, only one plant did well, I got 11.5 LBS, from the one plant, the other 7 produced about 38 pounds. I have not done much with my garden this year and the ground is as hard as a rock. If my memory is correct the ground was so wet that I did not even till when I planted the sweet potatoes, I just planted and then mulched.

How much longer can I leave mine in the ground? They are doing pretty good but would like to wait till last minute to give them a chance to size up as much as possible.

The main thing to avoid is that the roots get chilled. The most common way they get chilled, when we wait, is that we have cooler nights and a cold soaking rain.

Once nights cool down, I see no reason to leave them out there. The grow rate at that point will be negligible. We've had two really cool nights here. My gut instinct is that now is the optimal time to dig.... I might even get around to it.

George

George, we got all ours dug, but due to inattentiveness, we ended up with the Cordner Red and Red Wine Velvet in the same box and don't know which is which now. Is there any way to tell them apart? They look really similar to us. The greenhouse seems like a good place to cure them. We will put a small heater in the hot room to keep them warm at night. Don't need it during a sunny day. Cordner Red and Red Wine Velvet in top left crate.

Clockwise from top left--Cordner Red and Red Wine Velvet, Molokii, Brinkly White, Barberman (tan) and Grand Asia (pink). Molokii was the most productive, but brittle and broke in digging, Barberman was the least productive.

Well, Red Wine Velvet and Cordner Red are difficult to tell apart. When digging, they are a little easier to tell apart, as Cordner Red tends to come up in bunches, like red colored bananas. Red Wine Velvet, on the other hand, though it may have a nice concentrated set, won't pull out of the ground like that.

I can't tell them apart when looking at individual roots. I can tell them apart when cooked. The flavor and texture is different between the two. Wish I could help more!

George

Thanks, George. It was our fault for not paying more attention to where we were in the row. We planted them next to each other and just kept digging thinking they were all the same. Next time we'll plant them at opposite ends of the row.

Dorothy, It has worked for a long time. Maybe for 7 or 8 years now. I've never once had a deer jump it, but on the rare occasion that I've left the gate open at night (OOPS!), I have come outside in the early morning around sunrise and found deer in the garden. Because they saw me (and even though I quickly retreated indoors to avoid frightening them), they wouldn't leave though the gate, and did manage by repeatedly jumping to eventually get over the top of the fence from inside the garden. They did a lot of damage during their mad stampede of running around wildly inside the garden trying repeatedly to jump the fence. I learned a lesson then about double-checking the gate at night to make sure it was closed and firmly latched.

Everyone I know here has had success with an 8' fence, but I know that in some parts of the country, it takes a 10' fence. Some years I have had deer loitering just outside the garden fence repeatedly, sometimes even when they could clearly see me inside the garden (Hint: always close the gate behind yourself or you may find a deer coming in through the gate while you're inside the garden, and guess how I know that). I felt like those deer absolutely were planning to jump the 8' fence and I was worried they might succeed, so I tied white Wal-mart bags to the fence at roughly a deer eye level. I think any white material would work, it is just that at that point in time, white Wal-Mart bags were what I had. I tied them every 6' or 8'. They were tied so that they would flutter in the breeze. Because white-tailed deer use their white tails to signal danger to one another, I was hoping white fluttering bags would send a "Danger! Flee!" signal to any deer contemplating jumping the fence. It seemed to work. Those loitering deer went away.

I thought that maybe one reason my 8' fence worked in the front garden was because the woodland comes up almost to the fence on two sides (north and west) and the driveway is on the south side, with the barbed wire property line fence just a few feet south of the driveway. I figured that at least on those three sides, deer found it hard to get a running start to leap an 8' fence. The east side had no real obstructions, but it slopes downhill which might discourage jumping the fence from that side.

When we built the new back garden three years ago, we put up a sturdier woven wire fence than we have in the front garden. We used landscape timbers for poles and a very heavy gauge woven wire fencing material. That garden has wide-open land on all sides and I was worried deer would jump that fence because several deer trails run though that area. They've never made it over that 8' fence and into the garden, and I've never even seen any sign that they've tried. I've also noticed that the professional game/hunting ranches both here in our county and across the Red River in Montague County, TX, have 8' high fences, so they must find that the 8' high fences keep their deer contained within. However, those game ranches mostly have heavy timber along the fence lines and that might help keep their deer from jumping since the trees are so close to their fences.

Dawn