Good to see you around again vgkg. Sweetpotatoes should be checked for maturity about once a week and when the majority of plants have a good harvest, all the vines should be dug up at once. The reason for checking them regularly is that there are differences in maturity for varieties and based on the temperature they grow in. Hotter temps = faster maturing taters. Georgia Jet at roughly 100 days is one variety that MUST be harvested on time. They just make huge split deformed and often diseased roots if you let them go too long. Okinawan is the opposite end of the spectrum with 140 days to full maturity and often does not make a crop even here in Alabama because our season is really not long enough. DarJones

Johnny, Well, my mouth is watering too, and whatever breakfast I choose to have this morning will pale in comparison to the vision (pun intended) in my mind of the meal y'all are going to serve to the supporters of Vision Farms. How wonderful it is that y'all have access to a commercial kitchen! Amy, My mom and all my relatives fried lots of everything, but we always also had salad at every dinner and generally 2 or more vegetables, and other than fried okra or french fries, the veggies were rarely fried. It is, of course, a requirement in our family that okra be fried or over-roasted. Sometimes my dad would fry up a delicious dish that had no name. It really consisted of whatever he could bring in from the garden that day, but my favorite combination was when he fried together sliced or diced potatoes, sliced okra, diced peppers and either sliced or diced onions. He'd fry it in bacon and other meat drippings (saved in a metal canister that sat on the counter and said "GREASE" on it, lol,) in a cast iron skillet and would chop up a couple of slices of bacon and cook that with the fried veggies. Then, when it was more than half-way cooked, he'd randomly scatter a couple of handfuls of corn meal over the pan of frying veggies, and stir-fry it with them. A plateful of this fried veggie concoction was a meal in itself and you really didn't even need to prepare a meat dish to go with it. Although.....it was especially delicious if you also had a bowl of either red pinto beans or pink eye purple hull peas and a slice of hot, buttered cornbread to eat with it. My dad would grin broadly and say "that's good eating!". We probably ate a typical southern diet when I was a kid, but my mom was not all that crazy about cooking so her idea of cooking veggies was to open a can or green beans or corn or carrots and dump them into a saucepan to heat them up. It was my dad who'd make everything from scratch on the weekends, and he'd cook southern style veggies, whether fresh from the garden or from a market grower that had a market garden about 1.5 miles from our house, and he'd cook them in a way that made you drool. Tim and I fried food early in our married years, but really cut back on the frying over the years so that we eat a fairly healthy diet now. We eat a lot of grilled meat and lots of homegrown veggies and fruit, and largely avoid fast food for the most part. Chris doesn't eat as healthy in general as we do and he eats more fast food, but being a firefighter who cooks at work, he is a great cook and knows many healthy ways of preparing food. He fights hard to get the guys at his station to eat in a more healthy way, but most of them are not nearly as much into healthy eating as he is. I feel fortunate that I grew up with grandparents who gardened and farmed and prepared food from scratch always and forever, and with many aunts and uncles who did the same. Any and every family gathering was chock full of every dish imaginable, and I've never seen a family chow down on pickled food (they'd pickle and eat anything and everything) like my dad's family did. It wasn't until I was an adult, probably already in my 30s, that I finally understood that the reason pickled foods played such a large role in their meals was that back during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression years, his large farm family canned all their own food, and pickling was one of the safer methods in use then, so they developed a real appreciation for pickled stuff. I finally understood why you might see 10 different kinds of pickled foods on a holiday table. I assume each of the now-adult kids was bringing their favorite kind of pickled vegetable, and it was always the two sisters who made sure that no two families were bringing the same thing in order to avoid duplication. I used to wonder why we had pickled everything when I was was kid, but I understand it better now. No one on this earth (including me) can fry a chicken that is as good as the fried chicken my mom cooked in a cast iron skillet when we were children, and believe me, I have tried to replicate it many times. She really didn't like cooking and used lots of convenience foods as they became available in the 1960s (she thought those little TV dinners in aluminum pans were the bomb!), but no one could cook better fried chicken. It is just that she didn't cook it nearly often enough! One reason I love edible gardening so much is that it makes me feel closer to the older generations that went before us. When I am sitting and snapping beans or shelling peas, or when I am cooking them or we are eating them, I feel so very connected to all the relatives who taught us to cook (largely by example) and to preserve the garden bounty when we were young. I can still hear my grandmother's voice reciting whatever she had done on a given day. She'd say something like "I put up 6 quarts of green beans and then I did 9 quarts of beets......" and I still can hear those words in my mind as clear as day even though she's been gone for almost two decades. Now, I'm the one reciting to my family or friends, telling them how many pints or quarts of this or that that I've put up that day or that week. It is a continuity in our family that I like. Kim, Well, you led a deprived life. Oh my! I grew up on cornbread and cannot imagine life without it. My dad's favorite meal, and one we had every single Wednesday (I don't know why it was always on Wednesdays) for my entire childhood was red beans cooked in a pot on the stove with chopped onions and chopped up bacon in them, some sort of boiled greens---turnip, mustard, spinach, collards, etc., and cornbread. He always had a bottle of pepper-flavored vinegar that he sprinkled on his beans, which he referred to as "pepper sauce", and I think he happily would have eaten this meal 5 or 6 days a week even though it was simple food. I probably was in high school before I learned that some people ate fish that wasn't fried, or at least baked in the oven like fish sticks. To this day, in my mind, the only way to eat catfish is breaded in cornmeal and fried. Tim was teased a lot about being a transplanted Texan back in the 1980s and 1990s. Eventually he lost his Yankee accent and could pass as a native Texan, but he always told people "I wasn't born in Texas but I got here as soon as I could". When we got engaged, I only agreed to marry him after he promised me that he'd never ask me to leave Texas. I wanted to be sure he wouldn't up and decide to move back to the Yankee land of snow and cold weather and short growing seasons after we got married, because I had absolutely no desire to live anywhere that the cold months outnumber the warm ones. When we began to tire of city living and began to discuss moving to the country to get away from the rat race of living in a large metro area, I was the one who suggested we look for land in southern Oklahoma, which still felt much more rural back then than adjacent areas of Texas. He was shocked that I'd consider leaving my home state, but I found the people here to be every bit as wonderful as the Texans I'd grown up with, and many fewer Yankees had infiltrated Oklahoma back then, but Texas was overrun with them. Oklahoma was the perfect solution for us. Dawn

Ok, so I made it today. I did use a crockpot, but otherwise I did it almost exactly as tvq1 said. I left out the cauliflower (odd), and the celery (DH hates it, so I never have it.) At the last minute I also left out the lentils. I hadn't cooked them yet, and my crockpot was already full to the brim. It was thick and hearty, and already had tons of fiber with the pumpkin, beans and sweet potato. So I figured they wouldn't be missed. I used one hefty sweet potato and no butternut squash. I added 1/2 t of salt to brighten the flavors a bit. Probably not needed. I ended up using 4c of broth, and it's really thick. I agree that doubling the spices was a good idea. It has a little heat, but not too much. Really flavorful. It would be bland as written. I would say I'll make it again, but I'm going to be eating this out of the freezer for a long time! Edit: to add, that since it was crockpot, I put in everything at the beginning except the quinoa. I initially turned it on high, my crockpot is old. I intended to turn it down, but we left and I forgot. About 5 hours on high was plenty!

Don't wash the dirt off of them if you are going to store them for a while. Wash them if you are going to eat them now. Don't store in the refrigerator. Store them in a cool dark basement , ( a root cellar would be ideal) . Keep them out of the light or they will start spouting. a dark closet will do if nothing else. Keep a check on them for any rotten ones. Toss any rotten ones before they spread the rot to the others You can lay them in the shade till the dirt dries and then store them in the dark. Don't leave them in the sun for very long or they will turn green and slightly toxic. You can cover crop the ground afterwards if you want or grow something else. Maybe amend the ground for a fall garden. Cool season things like brocolli , cabbage .. greens .. https://tinygardenhabit.com/what-to-grow-after-potatoes-to-extend-your-season/ Here's an old thread from my area: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/4515261/succession-planting-after-potatoes OkieHU