chudh - For future endeavors, you can take one potato, and submerge about the bottom third of it in a glass of water. You can stick toothpicks in the potato about a third of the way down and rest the toothpicks on the glass. The potato will begin to sprout. After the sprouts are about 6 inches long, you can pop them off of the potato and put them in water and they will make roots. These small plants are called slips, and you can make multiple slips from one potato. In fact, I have a barrel of sweetpotato plants growing in my garden right now that all came from one potato. I didn't throw it out when I finished and now my kitchen window is filled with potato vines. You will have to add more water to your glass from time to time. Easy to grow.

Okiehobo, The sweet potatoes have very thin skins when dug. You have to let them cure for a while before you brush off the dirt, or--as you have discovered--you can brush off the skin with the dirt. The way to harvest sweet potatoes is to dig them while the soil is fairly dry and before soil temperatures drop below 50 degrees. While digging, gently lift them from the soil and place them in a container. Once your container is full, remove them from the container and lay them out on several layers of newspaper and let them do the first round of curing that way for 3 or 4 hours. Do not wash them or brush off the dirt at this point. I usually put several layers of paper on a table on my patio and cure them there in the shade where they are sheltered from rain, dew, etc. After 3 or 4 hours, you can move them to a more permanent curing location like a garage, sunporch, etc. Lay them on several layers of newspaper, and if you want to make it easier to move them around, lay the newspaper in plant flats or shallow cardboard boxes. Lay the potatoes in a single layer in a location that is somewhat sheltered and it should be a warm, somewhat humid, and definitely well-ventilated place. Cure them there for a couple of weeks. During this time the skin will toughen up quite a bit. You then can brush off the dirt gently or you can leave the dirt on them until you bring them inside to eat. At this point, you can put them in their permanent storage location. An unheated basement or tornado shelter works great, but so does an unheated pantry or closet. They store best right around 55 degrees and can incur cold damage if exposed to air temperatures below 50 degrees. Sweet potatoes normally don't store for a really long time--just a couple of months in general, and sometimes up to 4 to 6 months if they're really well-cured, and have high humdity and perfect temperatures around 55. The ornamental sweet potato you're thinking of is likely Marguerite. I've linked an image of it below. The ornamental sweet potatoes are normally available in nurseries around April or so. At the end of the season, you can dig up the 'potatoes' of the ornamental ones and store them for next year. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Marguerite Ornamental Sweet Potato

DL, You won't have a MG sweet potato cross. They are closely related, but not close enough to cross. Morning Glories are Ipomoea purpurea(regular) or Ipomoea nil(Japanese). (There's a few others too, but that's for another discussion.) Sweet potatoes are Ipomoea batatas. Normally when the second name, species name, is different, the plants won't cross. There's a few exceptions, but that is the general rule. Sometimes some plants can be made to cross in laboratory conditions, and sometimes plants can cross naturally like certain purple coneflowers. Those really to me should be sub species and not have their own name species. (Again that's for another dicussion, lol.) Anyway, what I'm trying to say is they have a lot of the same DNA, but not enough to be compatible to have babies. Remy

I am having similar problems with my tomatoes and peppers in the garden here in Maricopa. Your pictures duplicate what I am seeing. The only confusing part is that it's not prevelent on all of the plants. I have 6 varieties of tomatoes and several of peppers. Bush Champ has this problem, Bush Goliath to some degree and one of my heirlooms, a large plum variety from Sicily, is really sick. I'm using NEEM combo insecticide and fungecide along with Seven dust separately. The palnts get sufficient sun, water, and nutrients. Have you found anything that helps?