Sorting sweet potatoes

  The reality is, not every sweet potato is perfect.  Some get cut when we plow the sweet potatoes out, some are really crazy shapes, some are tiny and some are huge, and some are partially rotten.  While some farms might just grab the best ones and leave the rest in the field, we have a use for every sweet potato that grew, no matter how it looks.  So we pack them all in the harvest boxes to be sorted out later. 
  Now, with colder days outside, we're glad for the indoor chore of sorting through boxes.  While we've been eating and selling sweet potatoes up until now, we've just been going through boxes one at a time as needed.  But the time has come to get all of the boxes sorted.

  In the field, the dirt is rubbed off from the sweet potatoes and they are packed carefully into half bushel cardboard boxes.  Since we grow 23 varieties of sweet potatoes, keeping track of box contents is very important.  Boxes are labeled with the variety name both on a piece of paper and written on the inside of the box lid.

  The sweet potatoes are then sorted into four different categories.  This is a picture of some first quality sweet potatoes.  They are pretty, of normal size and shape and without blemishes.  These are the ones we sell.

These are the seconds, the ones that are quite small or very large or odd shaped or broken, etc.  These are the ones we will eat.

  These are the seed potatoes.  We choose healthy looking roots with no blemishes.  They are fairly small in size.  These will be stored until we are ready to put them in our seed bed in early April to grow sweet potato slips.

   Finally, these are the thirds, which includes the very tiniest ones and ones that have significant rot or other issues.  These will be fed to our goats or cooked and fed to the hogs.  The dirt is returned to the garden.