Sweet Potatoes are a great vegetable to grow in the warmer southern U.S. but you can also grow them in the northern zones with a warm summer and some tricks to warm the bed up.
Some of the best varieties to grow in cooler weather are Beauregard, Georgia Jet, and Porto Rico.
I will provide you with tips on growing your own Sweet Potato slips to grow a large crop for yourself.
How to Grow Sweet Potatoes from Slips
From one organic sweet potato, you can get lots of starts for planting without having to buy them.
Go to the store to purchase your favorite organic sweet potato. The reason for buying an organic sweet potato is that the others may have been sprayed with a sprouting inhibitor to prevent them from sprouting. You want to make sure yours will sprout.
To keep them from rotting you need 4 500 mg vitamin “C” pills ground up in a blender with enough water to cover your sweet potato. once you have this blended up you want to pour it into a container that you can cover the sweet potato for about 15-30 minutes to soak in. This will help to reduce the chance of the sweet potato rotting.
The best way to promote the sweet potato to root and grow slips is to use a good quality potting mix, laying the sweet potato flat in the potting mix just about covering it but leaving the very top uncovered. Once you have the potato placed in the potting mix you can water it in.
Place the sweet potato in a sunny window indoors and within 3-4 weeks you will notice growth starting.
As the slips grow to about 6 inches you can pinch them off and strip off the bottom leaves before placing them in a jar of water. Place them in a sunny window sill until the roots have good strong growth. It can take another 2-4 weeks before they are ready to plant in the ground.
Leave the sweet potato in the potting soil to get more starts as long as it has not rotted. If one end is beginning to rot you can cut that end off.
Planting the slips
Get good slips to start your sweet potatoes as early as possible to lengthen the growing season and allow the potatoes to grow as large as possible.
Prepare your bed with good organic light soil.
If you live in the south where it is warmer for a longer period of time you can plant in any sunny location.
If you live in a cooler climate you will need to find the warmest and sunniest area in your yard and mound up the area and cover it with plastic to keep the soil warmer. You can actually do this several weeks prior to planting to increase the soil temperature and provide your sweet potatoes with the best conditions to produce a large crop.
In this picture, I covered the area with weed cloth to heat up the soil and cut several holes in the cloth to plant each sweet potato.
Another way to improve growing conditions in cooler climates you may need to provide extra heat to your sweet potatoes. You can do this by using a cloche or a row cover to create a mini greenhouse.
Harvesting
You can harvest the leaves to eat as well as the potatoes themselves, in the north you may get more of the leaves to eat rather than the potatoes themselves.
To harvest your sweet potato crop you can either dig by hand or use a pitchfork starting far enough out from plants to not dig into the potatoes.
Update on Sweet Potatoes
It has been a few weeks now and the sweet potatoes are showing signs of them rooting as they continue to root (3 weeks)
The sweet potatoes that I have in my greenhouse without heat are showing some signs of rotting.
The sweet potatoes that I have indoors are looking great with 8-10 sprouts and a few just about ready to pick and put in a jar of water after 1 month (see picture above).
After 1 month the sprouts are reaching 6 inches, and are ready to pick and place in a jar of water. The first one I picked had lots of roots which will kick start them rooting.
As you can see in the above picture the sweet potato starts are doing great, I have 17 starts from these 2 sweet potatoes and they are still producing more each week and they are not rotting so I will be sharing some of these starts with others.
So far this process to grow sweet potatoes appears to be working very well, keep coming back to see the progress.
As you can see in mid-July my sweet potatoes are growing very well above ground and I hope that they are doing as well underground.
I am actually going to plant a 2nd crop to see how they do since I have many other starts from my original sweet potatoes.
July 9th update: I just planted the 2 sweet potatoes that had several plants still growing from early in the year, I did not have a place in the garden so I am experimenting with planting them in a large pot to see what they will do. I will post updates to see if this is successful.
I hope you have enjoyed getting started with How to Grow Sweet Potatoes as much as I have.
