At Work: Fresh Harvest in February

I live on Camp Pleasant Road, but on most days, I'm in Frankfort working for Kentucky State University as a research assistant in Organic/Sustainable Vegetable Production. We do a lot of interesting work there, and I can't help but share some of it on this blog. This may not have happened at Camp Pleasant, but some things are related. . .

Last November, as winter was setting in, we took a large portion of our sweet potato harvest and buried it deep in the ground. We had a bit of help from John Clay, a working farmer in his eighties, who claims to be the last colored farmer in Franklin County. (I'm sure that the inevitable BOOM that farming is about to have will change that!) John told us about vegetable storage pits that his parents used to use when he was growing up. Large parts of Kentucky didn't get electricity until the 1950's or so, so many people grew and stored their own food without refrigeration. You can see a video of the construction of our pit on our Kentucky State University Organic Agriculture Working Group website:

http://organic.kysu.edu/FoodStorage.shtml

Just a few days ago, I dug into the soil and found our pit of potatoes and straw. I was amazed. While winter froze and thawed, and dropped inches of snow and ice through December and January, the soil had insulated our pit and preserved a large percentage of our harvest. Below are some pictures.

This is the pit. The blue tarp covered the pit from November to February, and helped keep moisture from getting into the sweet potatoes. The pit is designed to insulate vegetables from freezing, and to keep them in a dry bed of straw or sand.

As you can see, our pit was covered with about 2.5 feet of soil. It is a lot of work to dig into a pit like this...but it is rewarding. Digging into a pit like this is an amazing experience, and it makes it clear why people built root cellars...you only have to dig once!

Clean, dry, live sweet potatoes...

This picture shows the amount of good potatoes and the amount of rotten potatoes. Not bad, if you ask me. Many of the good potatoes had bruises that we had to cut out before cooking. But the taste was everything you'd expect from a sweet potato.
We have about 10X as much as this buried in our pit, and we hope to keep many of them alive until time for replanting in spring!

We also buried temperature-taking probes inside the pit, and we will publish the winter temperatures at different levels in the pit, alongside outside air and soil temperatures, on the KSU Organic Working Group's website.