If you have any slips of these sweet potatoes,I would like to trade for some??cecilburdeshaw@bellsouth.net THANKS

I saw some of these for sale this spring at an oriental grocery in Nashville TN. I bought a small one to sprout, but it rotted rather instead. Then I read in VEGETABLES, AMARANTH TO ZUCCHINI that the oriental sweet potatoes are often treated with a sprout inhibitor. Next visit to the store, there were no more purple ones, but I bought a tan-skinned white fleshed one, and it sprouted just fine. The white fleshed ones are more traditional in the south anyway, it probably wasn't shipped from as far away. I did get some yellow sweet potatoes from a neighbor in TN years ago that had some purple veins running in them. I think they were from a strain that had been grown for a long time and had done some mutating. The deep orange strains have to be rouged every few years as they want to sport back to yellow.

There are a few places that I want to go back and see just to remember when I was there as a child/teenager: Kamakura, Mt. Fuji, the Ginza/Tokyo downtown, Tachikawa (we lived in Ome outside the Tachikawa Air Force Base which is now a park). But then I want to go all the way up to Sapporo and down to Kyushu & Shikoku and over to the western shore, maybe Sado Island. I doubt I would ever get to go back so I would want to do it all. I have friends that WWOOF in Italy during their off season (they are organic farmers). I'm not sure what I would do with my large garden and pets in order to go away for such a long time but someday I will go back to Japan.

Well, I chunked up my purple taters, peeled them, boiled them, and then I put them in the blender. I was trying to mush them enough so I could make a pie filling. However, those things kept getting thicker and thicker, and so I added some nice fat free half and half....and instead of sugar, I put in a cup of Splenda. And the color is the most gorgeous lavender. I've done no further cooking, but it takes a big spoon to dip this out of the blender container. I think about 48 ounce size too. And my parrots love it, the dogs love it, and I love it. I mean, what is not to like about this smooth concoction, which tastes and has the texture of a pudding. I did not add any vanilla, but I suppose I could have but I wanted to see the taste of the natural sweet potato. Also, I could have left out the Splenda and had a veggie smoothie. I've downloaded a book on my Kindle which is a book about making green smoothies, out of raw foods. The blessed thing about such food, so many of the green foods are "free" foods that do not count against your diet if you are diabetic. That is one reason I've begun eating more dill pickles, sauerkraut, jalapenos, mustard on any sandwich, and then the SaraLee 10 carb whole wheat sliced bread....sometimes just one slice for an open faced sandwich. But the green smoothies are espousing the raw food diet, going beyond vegan to raw, and eliminating cooked foods of any kind. You can go part way with this sort of diet, which is what I would do, but I will give it a go because by eating raw greens, I've already lost 8 pounds. Hard to take it off, but great when it happens.