Sweet Potato

[SoyBean]

I love eating a baked sweet potato with brown sugar. Yum! So my grandmother sent me home with a sweet potato weeks ago. Now that we are moving out of our apartment, I was looking through the kitchen and found it sitting on top of our microwave. It is not going bad or anything, but instead sprouting little purple "roots". So I was wondering if I could plant this sweet potato.

How do you grow a sweet potato?

 

[bid]

The little purple thing will be leaves also called "slips". I have a sweet potato suspended about 1/3 of the way in water, pointy end down in the water, and it has put out about 8 or 10 of these slips so far.

This will be my first time growing sweet potatos, but from what I have read you let the slips get about 5 or 6 inches tall and break them off where they come out of the potato. I plan on rooting mine in paper tube rolls before I move them out to the garden. They like heat, so I am trying for sometime around May to have some rooted and ready to go outside.

Maybe some more experienced sweet potato growers can offer some more tips to us .

 

[SoyBean]

So these purple things are actually the leaves of the plant? So the other end is the bottom? How do I plant it. The slips are on top? Do I plant it in soil?

I guess the heat from the microwave made it start growing. There are about 5-6 slips so far and the largest one is about 2-3 inches long.

 

[bid]

The way I am trying it is this: I took 3 wooden skewers, that I usually use for grilling, and stuck them in the potato about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom of the pointy end of the potato. I took a largish vase with a wide enough mouth on it to accomodate the potato and filled it with water and let the potato rest on the rim of the vase on the skewers.

The roots came out below the level of the water first on mine and they are white in color. Slowlyyyyyy the leaves started growing out both above and below the level of the water, although the majority are above the water level, so far. They start as a little purplish "bump" and begin to develop some green color and leaf shape as they grow.

My plan is to break the slips off at about 6 inches in length and then root them in a potting mix. After that, out to the garden they go. Of course I have never tried sweet potatos before, so I am learning as I go.

One method of growing slips I read about was to slice the potato in half lengthwise and cover them with a few inches of wet sand or potting mix. I decided that was just inviting an infestation of some sort of annoying bugs in the house so I chose the vase and water.

 

[SoyBean]

So stick skewers 1/3 from the bottom and fill some container with water and set the skewers on top so that the bottom of the potato is beneath the water. It will then sprout roots and you cut off the slips when they are 6 inches long. Now, do you break them off or cut them off the potato?

 

[bid]

Now, do you break them off or cut them off the potato?

That's a good question. I have no idea what the answer is. Anybody know best practice? Clean cut or possibly a somewhat ragged break. Most of what I have read usually mentions how easy they are to grow. If it's easy, that's about my speed. Afterall, we are on the TEG site

 

[dbjay417]

I've spent the last year trying to kill a massive patch of sweet potatoes. It was taking up way too much space. I admire the suckers persistance, so after the 4th assassination attempt, and before the final death blow, i transplanted a few sprouts to a different area of the yard. A patch of hard inhospitable soil with lots of rocks from an hold house that was once there. I'm hoping that even if the fruit arent that great, they will enrich that piece of terrain a little.

 

[seedcorn]

I've spent the last year trying to kill a massive patch of sweet potatoes. It was taking up way too much space. I admire the suckers persistance, so after the 4th assassination attempt, and before the final death blow, i transplanted a few sprouts to a different area of the yard. A patch of hard inhospitable soil with lots of rocks from an hold house that was once there. I'm hoping that even if the fruit arent that great, they will enrich that piece of terrain a little.

What kind are these? I've only seen annuals that will eventually die. When happens when you dig up the tubers? What you miss resprout?

 

[sheps4her]

I grew sweet potatoes last year. They were great! I grew them like I grew my other potatoes and they took over! They were quite yummy too!

 

[dbjay417]

I've spent the last year trying to kill a massive patch of sweet potatoes. It was taking up way too much space. I admire the suckers persistance, so after the 4th assassination attempt, and before the final death blow, i transplanted a few sprouts to a different area of the yard. A patch of hard inhospitable soil with lots of rocks from an hold house that was once there. I'm hoping that even if the fruit arent that great, they will enrich that piece of terrain a little.

What kind are these? I've only seen annuals that will eventually die. When happens when you dig up the tubers? What you miss resprout?

yup, if you miss even the tiniest underdeveloped tuber new leaf growth will sprout right up.

I dunno what kind they are, but they have been here longer than i have as the patch was massive when i moved here in Nov of 07. the woman we rented to before we moved here, said that they had been there so long the plant was no longer preforming as it should, and that her son in law used to pass the lawn mower over it. to try to kill it.