This past Spring, we had a sweet potato on our kitchen counter that had sprouted, so Julie chopped it into thirds and threw them into an empty space in our raised-bed garden. We literally did NOTHING else except to run the sprinklers on our normal one-day-a-week ration schedule.

When the vines started to look very healthy in early Fall, our curiosity peaked and I looked online to study how/when to harvest, should we have a crop. The info I found said to wait until after the first freeze, when the leaves of the vine are darker. So, in mid-December, we had our first steady cold spell that included a few freeze warnings. Sure enough, the leaves began to darken even more than they had, so I jumped at the opportunity to dig up what possible crop we had.

We could already see the tops of several potatoes bulging through the surface, so I knew we would have a few, but I was pleasantly surprised when we dug up 2-dozen or so sweet potatoes in varying sizes.