So many people are trying to find ways to be more sustainable. I suggest growing a lot of sweet potatoes. They are possibly the most nutritious vegetable and keep for a really long time.
Did you know that sweet potatoes will keep more than six months if stored in a dry cool place? They keep even longer than regular potatoes.
If you google the question "How long will sweet potatoes last" however, you will find that most answers will say they last only a few weeks or a month. I disagree. We have grown them for the past three years and ours keep for months on end. We finally ate the last of our home-grown sweet potatoes last night and they were harvested in mid September. That's seven months!
Some of the smaller ones got soft after six months, but the large Beauregard sweet potatoes stayed rock hard and fresh. They tasted just as good as they did the day after we dug them.
I don't know why others say they that they don't store well for lengthy periods. Maybe they are speaking of store-bought potatoes that are already fairly old. Home-Grown fresh sweet potatoes are amazing and do keep for a long time.
Sweet potatoes are pretty easy to grow because they do not require very fertile soil. They do like a slightly acidic soil like potatoes do, but sweet potatoes are actually NOT potatoes. We call them potatoes because they look somewhat like potatoes and we dig them up in the same way. You can't grow a sweet potato plant by putting a sweet potato in the ground like you can with potatoes. the easist way to grow sweet potatoes is by purchasing plants. Sweet potatoes are actually in the morning glory family.
Sweet potatoes are not the same as yams either. Yams come from South America or Africa and are part of the Lily family. I haven't conducted a taste test, but I read that yams are more bland and less nutritious than our beloved sweet potatoes.
Sweet Potato plants need about 100 days to produce mature root tubers (what we eat), and can not tolerate frost at all. If frost hits the plants, the sweet potatoes will be ruined as well. We made that mistake our first year. Frost caused the tubers to turn black a blotchy!
If you have never grown sweet potatoes before, I urge you to give them a try. They taste so much better than store bought and infinitely better than canned! They should keep long enough for you to have fresh sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, or even Christmas. Or like us, you can eat them the following April!
Believe me, they were so good.
Have a great weekend!