The 4x8 bed should be ok for the 7 slips. I'm no sweet potato expert, but sounds like you soil might be too 'good' for sweet potatoes. I've grown them twice with good results, and the main reason I got excited about growing them is because one of the first things I read about growing them was that they like 'poor' soil. We had plenty of that. Last year I just tillled up a small piece of ground, put down some landscape fabric for extra warmth, and stuck in some slips and barely watered them and fertilized "lightly." Sorry for the digression and all the 'I's'. Don't know anything about varieties. The photo is of our small patch last year, maybe 3x3 or so, and we planted 4 slips and got about 10 pounds of potatoes.

This post was edited by edweather on Mon, May 20, 13 at 10:45

I've also heard they like lower quality soil. All we have around here is red clay, and the whole point of raised beds is to grow stuff in soil that isn't so hard to manage. Might it be possible to plant some sort of heavy feeder (like corn) in the box as well to suck up some of those nutrients? Or maybe plant watermelons (like Golden Midget) around the edges so they won't shade the sweets?

I don't really know, but maybe corn would be be better because it grows vertically as long as it doesn't shade the potatoes too much. Watermelons would be competing with the ground space too much IMO. The sweet potatos might grow fine by themselves. Just don't feed them at all.

dunno we just stick ours in the ground and they grow and produce, we grow the more heirloom types a white skinned and a red/purple skinned model.

len

Here is a link that might be useful: lens growing sweet 'taters and pineapples

I raise nice sweetpotatoes in good soil. I make a ridge to plant them in. 7 plants in the 4x8 is ok.

This post was edited by wayne_5 on Mon, May 20, 13 at 19:00

While they are vining, you can cut a stem and stick it back into the soil rather than let it climb up the fence. It will root and you'll get more sweet potatoes underneath.

I would not go as far as planting other things to suck up nutrients. They may be light feeders but they still need some nutrients. As long as you aren't dousing them with blue juice, you should be fine.

If I root the cuttings will the tubers have time to mature before I dig them? I got stuck with a lot of spindly tubers last year and don't want that to happen again...

In my not-at-all-vast experience growing sweet potatoes, they take a LONG time to mature, so you just have to be patient. Since they're in a raised bed you can peek at them and see how they're doing before deciding to dig them up. They might not be huge, but they shouldn't be spindly.

Last year I didn't re-root any of the stems and let them climb all over the garden and ended up with cute little sweet potatoes 20 feet away from the original plants. When I went to till this spring, I found more.

You might have harvested too early? Mine grow in the same mix as my other raised beds, water the same as the other beds and have had really nice harvests, I did have to put hardware cloth at the bottom because of rodents. Water should not be confused with nutrients. I harvested right before our first frost. I used the really small ones for sautéing, some were really finger size.

The finger sized roots are very tasty!

I ordered Beiler White, Cox's Yellow Jersey, Korean Purple and Tennessee Top Mark from Sand Hill. Those plus my Red Wine Velvet should give me a good mix.
I don't want potatoes rooting everywhere... so from what I gather they can root where the vines touch the ground? Maybe I could snip unruly vines and use the leaves as greens?
Thanks for all the replies!

Abby