My daddy grew lots of sweet potatoes and built a little building to keep them during the winter. Other people also paid him to store theirs. It had thick walls, one tiny window for a little light and a small wood stove which he had to keep a fire in throughout the winter.
He had a bed for the slips on a hillside which faced east and I remember that he used old sawdust in the soil. I think he sometimes grew enough slips to sell others.
He always cautioned us not to drop them into the baskets but to gently lay them in nor handle them too roughly, and to try not to handle them more than necessary. If we were picking some for a family meal he said not to move them around nor to pick through them but to pick the ones on top or they wouldn’t last.
I remember him peeling a skinny one down almost to the end, leaving a place on the very end to hold with our dirty fingers so that we could have a snack. I think he grew Beauregard mostly. I don’t remember ever seeing a white one.
He liked to use the tall bushel baskets and they sat on boards that made frames to keep the baskets off the floor of the potato house and allow air circulation.
I still have my grandmother’s small square aluminum pan she used to bake sweet potatoes in the oven. It had become black long before I remember. She would rub them with bacon grease before baking. We ate them baked, mashed with marshmallows on top and candied.
Another use for the potato house was to warm and dry newborn baby lambs when he had sheep. Somehow they were usually born on the coldest January nights. He would get up several times during the night to check the ewes. The newborn babies would be wrapped in tow sacks (burlap bags), put into a bushel basket and brought to the warm potato house until they were dry and ready to go back to their mom at the barn.
Matt and I never grow enough sweet potatoes to have to worry about longterm storage, but I remember Aunt Wanda’s brother Kenneth showing me an old building up above Hayesville that was a sweet potato barn. He said it was used by the whole community. He didn’t mention it having a stove for keeping the potatoes warm but I bet it had one back when it was in use.
I hope you enjoyed Sallie’s memories as much as I do!
Last night’s video: The Panther on Cold Mountain & Other Stories 15.
Tipper
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Sallie’s story about her daddy was as sweet as the taters he grew up I loved reading it and now I gotta go get me some sweet taters for supper. Love and blessings to all the Acorn families.
Hi Tipper and Acorns. This was a great story/memory. My Little Granny (Mama’s Mama) always said to prevent moles and voles from eating root vegetables in the garden that you needed to toss 3 dried pinto beans in with each root/seed/slip/cutting. I always do it. I love going to markets that sell NC sweet potatoes and NY white cabbage. That is always good eating. Most Farmers Markets here are on Saturday morning and I don’t do business on the Sabbath, so I miss out. My favorite sweet potato is the fingerling white ones. Little Granny used to serve them with the best black pepper and buttermilk battered fried chicken and chicken gravy made with milk. I’d dunk the sweet potato in the gravy. I made the dried apple dolls back in the 1970’s at the craft shop. I made all kinds of dolls. I love y’all.
Tipper, I’m just now reading this. Thanks for posting. What a surprise! I’ve enjoyed the comments. My mom and Dad were very practical people. Because they started a family during the Depression they tried to be self-sufficient. He could make a lot of things he needed but usefulness was a lot more important than beauty to him. He built our house out of pine logs from the farm, having $200 invested when they moved in with the first three children, mostly for the fireplaces and nails. About the year I was born (6th and last child) they got electricity but he was concerned that he might not be able to pay a monthly bill. If he didn’t have money he did without. There was no charging anything. It was a day when his word was good. He was trusted.
Another sweet potato memory was a snack when we were digging. We would find a potato about 1” in diameter. He would peel almost all the way down but leave enough to hold onto with our dirty fingers. Daddy always cautioned us when we went to get some to eat not to handle them any more than we had to. He said moving them around would cause deterioration. I never heard of white sweet potatoes until your posts but need to try some.
Thanks again and I really do enjoy the comments. I can’t imagine farming like Jeffrey and some of the others commenting. There are sweet potato farms in the county where I now live connected to the Ala state line. A few years ago I observed the harvest. A tractor pulled the machine which dug them from the soil, moved them up a conveyer belt where 6-8 family members hand-sorted. Times sure have changed and it’s great to remember how it used to be.
I remember sometime in grade school, probably 5th or 6th grade, we carved faces in apples and let them dry. Mine looked kind of witchy looking. I can’t remember how we made bodies for them. I know I tried it at home later on sometime. It was fun but not very successful. I always like to try new crafts. Luckily, we had a teacher that let us. Sallie’s dolls are so interesting…and so is the story of the sweet potatoes. Thank you for this fun post!
I won’t eat yeller (or orange) sweet taters but I love the bakes white ones. I don’t like them either until they are allow to get cold (refrigerator cold) so that the peelings come loose and I can peel them like a banana and eat them as is. No butter, no sugar, no nothing but tater. Yum, yum save me one!
What wonderful memories Sallie shared! Nothing smells so good as a pan of sweet potatoes baking. Mama or daddy would bake a large pan, and I couldn’t wait to get one for a snack. Daddy and I loved eating them with cracklings. So good! The next time I bake some, I’m going to try rubbing them in bacon grease.
We cured and kept our sweet taters in the basement. It was warmish down there but not too warm. We had wire racks that were handed down to us but I don’t know who gave them to us. Sweet taters and arsh taters kept a lot of families from starving to death.
What was described in the story was basically how we grew them. The only difference is we farmed sweet potatoes to the tune of 90+ acres for several years (also raised 15 acres of Arsh taters) in my youth. This was in the late 70’s-early 80’s. We raised our own slips in huge beds shored up with crossties and filled with sawdust, wetted down, and covered with clear plastic to let the sunlight in (warmth) and speed up the sprouting. The slips were planted into prepared ground. We plowed the field until he vines began to “run”. After that we hoed. Grown to fullness, the potatoes were “turned up” and gathered into bushel baskets. This was very labor intensive and before cheap labor began to arrive from “south of the Rio Grande”. I can still feel the burn of the small wire on the baskets lifting onto a trailer, stacking, then unloading and stacking. Before we started farming them, sweet potatoes cold be found in abundance a little farther east in Cullman and Blount counties. As a kid, I ate more as a “sweet” or dessert after supper. Of course, they were baked and coated in creamy butter. Despite the “years of forced labor”, I still enjoy an occasional “tuber” and count that period of my life as a blessing for the experience and knowledge I gained.
I hope everyone has a blessed and enjoyable week. We are having some beautiful spring weather with lots of sunshine. I wish all the same.
My parents had an uninsulated, unfinished, unheated lean-too type shed off the back of our home where we kept/stored fruits and vegetables throughout the ‘off’ season and anything else that needed cooler temperatures including most of the canning we did.
I well remember having to be so very careful not the bruise both sweet and Arsh potatoes. Bruises rot easily and one bruise on one potato can ruin the whole basket.
Daddy built a little rock building into the hillside across the creek. At first it was for storage of hatching eggs then after we stopped raising chickens it became a place to keep root crops and canned foods. It served well for all its purposes. It stayed the same temperature in every season and was often used by children seeking a brief respite from nature’s wrath.
Coincidence! I rubbed some sweet potatoes down with some bacon grease and baked them night before last. I love to bake them this way as the skin puffs up all around and they are easy to peel and ready to eat, by hand preferably.
My granny cooked them this way and always kept them on the stovetop covered with a cloth where they stayed warm and were snacks for many grandchildren long ago. I always think of her when eating them. Spring has Sprung and projects are underway here in the midlands. ❤️
Morning everyone. Tipper, sometimes I think you read my mind. Yesterday in this heat I made a sweet potato pie. It might have been you mentioning Granny and the mulching you did. My mind must have moved over to my dad. He loved sweet potato pies. In his late years he got Leukemia. His doctor said eat sweet potatoes and a glass of red wine everyday. Nothing more disturbing than seeing my dad drink wine, he never even drank coffee. His doctor said my dad was his longest patient who had that kind of blood cancer, so maybe there is something to the benefits. Could be all the pills he took, too. Both of my parents were from Eastern Europe, they didn’t know sweet potatoes. My dad had bought a pie at a club sale. He loved them. Anna from Arkansas.
My grandparents had a partly underground storage shed they called “the flower pit.” Grandma put certain potted plants in there for the winter, but I don’t recall that any potatoes were stored there. She ran a boarding house when I was a kid, so all of her garden produce was needed for the table while fresh. My cousin and I and the neighborhood kids mostly used the flower pit as a hideout or a make-believe machine gun nest. Incidentally, today here in Florida we look for N. C.-grown sweet potatoes, S. C. peaches, and Georgia’s Vidalia onions. All good stuff.
Gene, my grandmother had a large square hole underground with doors /top that would fold over it to keep her flowers in during the winter months. Mother told me some of her brothers got in this flower pit during the May 5th, 1933 Belton, SC tornado that came within 150 yards of my grandparents home.
Sweet potato slips are nearly impossible to find around here. The last ones I planted came from the folks who used to sponsor your garden. Sow True Seed sounds like the name of the company where I found a limited supply of the white variety. I planted a long ridge and covered the vines with old window screens, bending them into tent shapes to keep the animals from eating them. When I dug the taters, I was sickened by the half-eaten tubers voles or moles had been feasting on. Mom used to say swee-taters (one word) are best fried with a bit of sugar sprinkled on them as soon as they hit the pan.
The good Shepherd!
A couple of years before mom passed away, she craved sweet potatoes. Dad took care of her as long as he could but died within seven months after she left this old world fo heaven. He baked her a sweet potato every day. Dad grew a lot of sweet potatoes. Moma canned most of them for winter and kept a lot to eat fresh. I know dad grew a lot of arsh taters we kept on an old sheet in the basement. I love these old stories. They help to keep our memories alive.
Evidently Sallie’s Dad was a handy, caring and observing man. Strikes me he was the kind to do anything he did as well as he could. He certainly created some memories that are still blessings. That is one of the ways – and probably the best one – to “pay it forward” to children, grandchildren and maybe even reaching to great-grandchildren. I was in my 50’s before I began to see that. I would grow a hill or two of sweet potatoes this year if I had slips. Maybe I’ll sprout some sweet potatoes and get them that way.
Sally has wonderful memories of her dad’s sweet potato house and her grandmother baking them in the pan she now has and still bakes with. I enjoyed reading her story. I’ve never grown sweet potatoes. I tried once but all I got was beautiful long green leafy vines, with absolutely no sweet potatoes at all when I dug them up. I was so disappointed, so I never tried again after that experience. It was probably for the best, because no one in my small family likes sweet potatoes except me and my son in-law.
Daddy grew up carrying his lunch to school in a pail. There were always sweet potatoes and usually biscuits, often with cane syrup poured in a hole poked in one edge. I had sweet potatoes for supper last night!
thank you for the stories and the readings, the songs and the food and everything you do ! you ought ta publish everything in magazines monthly, i would subscribe !!!!!!!
Sallie’s sweet potato story was just wonderful! I especially loved the baby lambs were put in burlap sacks and bushel baskets and toted into the sweet potato barn to dry and then were returned to their mamas. I think Sallie’s daddy must’ve been a very kind and good man to care about animals, children, people and their crops storage. This is exactly where we need to return. The one thing missing from people today is a reason to keep going. They’ve got no real purpose and it’s on purpose as it has weakened our people tremendously. Men and women stagger literally about not having a clue or connection to the world they live in. Turn that squawk box off and stop listening to the BAD AND WORSER news. Go out and breathe and touch some dirt (where we came from and where we are headed. Get in touch with dirt.) Take your shoes off and set a chair in the grass… it may surprise ya. Since we are electromagnetic beings, let’s get charged up. Make an appointment with Dr. Spring today. He can see you today when you’re ready. He’s always open.
So enjoyed reading this! Can almost picture the potato house.
I loved reading that story. I see her comment often. Thank you for sharing. I might have missed it, but can you explain the ‘apple doll lady’ part of her name? Maybe she can share it.
We used to grow lots of sweet potatoes and I would can some of them for winter and just store the others. So good! I don’t can like I use to. It’s just the two of us and our kids can their own goods now. Our 15 yo twin granddaughters have really taken a shine to the kitchen cooking and baking. Starting to even sell some of their baked goods. I’m praying they get the canning bug too. Pass on our heritage.
Debbie, I went back and added the link here it is: https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/carving-apple-dolls/ Sallie is an amazing traditional artist 🙂
What an interesting lady. I never saw that article about Sally because I didn’t discover your channel until sometime in the late 2021. The dolls remind me of the “cabbage patch dolls” from years back.
I am enjoying your readings of The Panther On Cold Mountain and other stories. The names of communities and etc are so interesting, too. In my former home in North Georgia, I lived off a road called Devil’s Den Road. Hell’s Hollow was nearby. Little Fighting Town Creek ran through our property.
Have a blessed day!
There’s a town in Texas called Cut and Shoot! I can only imagine how that name was chosen.
In the Northwestern mountains of North Carolina (Surry County) is an unincorporated community called State Road. Right smack through the middle of State Road runs State Road #21.
About 40 miles east of State Road is a town called Rural Hall.
I remember when we would plant about 500 potato “slips” each year. We kept some and would sell some. I can vaguely remember storing them in the field inside a “house” made with dry corn stalks, leaves, straw or pine needles on the the “floor” and it covered with dirt and having tin over the top to keep it dry. I also remember when the area high schools began to have a heated storage building each year and would store the potatoes for the area farmers each winter. My uncle was a county agricultural agent and taught Daddy to mix borax with his fertilizer when we would set out/plant the potatoes each year. I don’t know the purpose for doing this. I have mentioned before about my friend planting 25-30 thousand sweet potatoes each year and will “sell out” within a few weeks each year. Daddy could make the best sweet potatoes pies I have ever ate, I don’t know what his secret was when he would make the them. One meal for supper we would often eat during the late fall and early winter, was turnip greens (sallet) cooked with backbone ribs, cornbread and a baked sweet potato.