It's interesting to hear of your experiment. I've only tried growing sweet potatoes a couple times, and they seemed to attract every animal around. I never harvested anything significant. But I still want to try them again :)

Many of yours look to be very thin and long. How do you prepare those for eating?

This was my 1st year for SP. They were planted as an afterthought...
Put in 15 plants & harvested about 65 lbs. I was disappointed. Some of my customers were getting 50 to 80 lbs from 5 plants!

I'm definitely growing them again next year tho'.

Mick

I haven't harvested my tubers (Bonita) yet, but I have enjoyed a couple of meals of the greens. They are delicious! Briefly steam/saute...no need to boil and change water like some other greens. I'll be growing SP again even if I don't get any tubers.

They need so much heat. Here in z7 my results are not a whole lot better than Slimy's, although of course they are not grown under cover. And boy do they attract herbivores .

Slimy, you didn't have any rodents go after tubers? That is often a major problem for me.

On sweet potatoes, which factor does one find to be the most determinate, the heat or length of time of the heat? This was my first year with sweet potatoes. I planted Muraski (purple skin, white flesh) and centennial (orange). I started digging the muraski and they are thin like pictured above. I have not started digging the Centennial yet. I am thinking that next year I will try growing them under perforated plastic but wonder if my short season is what is really going to do me in (May 15th-Oct 15th usually).

According to glen drowns of sandhill preservation (he has a great info page on SP-culture, the critical factor is heat-hours or days per season, not necessarily the overall frost-free period. Night-time minimums are very important.

Aha, then I absolutely will try it with the plastic next year. There are a few nights every summer when temperatures stay above 60 degrees but not many. enal insufficiency really hope to make sweet potatoes work for me as potatoes are often very difficult because we swing from freezes in early May to hot very quickly (like within a week).

pnbrown,

Nope, didn't experience any rodent issues. We have lots of squirrels (tree and ground) and field mice, but none of them touched the SPs. Maybe they need to get used to the new vegetable?

My experiment also suggests that night temps are the most important. My tunnel had WAY more heat units accumulated than the outdoor patch, but night temps. were not that different, and I got similar per-plant yields from both locations.

Nice haul for so far north! You're going to run out of heat-loving veggies to try soon... On to troppical fruit next? :)

With regards to rodents, I wonder if soil type plays a role in whether they get into the SPs. At our old house with the heavy clay soil we had no troubles with rodents in the SP but here with the light sandy loam they are a terrible nuicance! If memory serves me correctly, most of Mass. has sandy/gravelly soils, could that be a pattern?

We dug most of my 250-foot row, under biodegradable black fabric, yesterday. Probably the average was about a pound per foot, maybe about 2-3 lbs per plant. Two years ago in the same field I had a better yield than that, probably 50% better, but I didn't keep up on the weeds this year, and I didn't use sul-po-mag. The variety is Korean Purple which has consistently proved to be a top producer here, almost as prolific as Beauregard but far better eating IMO.

The soil there is heavy, and there was no rodent damage at all, so I am inclined to go with Sunnibel's theory.

To clarify:

this year I had some SP in very sandy soil, under black plastic with no irrigation, which had rodent problems (as well as poor performance overall). (irish potatoes in sandy soil in the past have had rodents eating the tubers also); and I had the bulk of the SP crop in the prime 50% clay loam under black fabric and drip tape running in the early part of the season.

It made for a very big difference. I think the unirrigated crop would have been better off without plastic on it - the light soil was so warm it drove all the moisture out of it.

Also, I tested some today with the refractometer. They are about 16-17 percent brix with a very hazy field, so super-high, above "excellent" on most charts. The haziness at least I would attribute to the azomite.

Without a doubt rodents prefer light soil. Voles, specifically. Chipmunks and gophers don't care. I too have experience both in very light soil and heavy soil. It is night and day as respect to voles.

Yes, voles are the guilty party I'm pretty sure. Yet they do not remain completely earth-bound, they have been climbing my corn stalks and shelling the ears in place.

At the risk of taking this further off topic for a moment (please excuse me), do either of you guys also have moles as a problem in the light soils? Because it seems to me the problems mainly start with a mole tunnel the the little tuber-eating bast*, er, voles move into and use to get near the plants underground without making a single hole I can spot from above ground. So I was thinking if I could get the moles out of the garden, maybe the voles couldn't be as destructive. Or is it just wishful thinking on my part? Because those little jerks are really getting on my nerves with the sweet potatoes... I have better luck with the irish potatoes in spring.

I also really like the Korean Purple SPs.

I can't say that I have any clue about that, other than I never see moles and I see lots of active digging and I see voles often. When I lift any large piece of cover there are voles underneath. That's at my remote garden, at home I have rats, sometimes huge numbers. However because they eat from the compost pile they don't do as much damage to crops.

Winnipeg Manitoba Canada. soil temp is the greatest determining factor use heavy mulch to keep ground warm into the fall. lots of organic matter to generate more heat. woodchips encourage flowering.

I planted sweet potatoes this year and they are not doing well. They are shaded by other more vigorous plants in the garden especially with the late planting date, and the slips I got from Steele were completely dried up. They sent more but they weren't much better and were very slow to get going, I was disappointed. I doubt I will grow them again. Maybe if I could plant them outside the fenced garden but as they are very attractive to deer I don't anticipate success. If I get a meal or two of fingerling sweet potatoes my expectations will be met.

I've grown sweet potatoes three times here in Northern Michigan, I'm zone 5. The first year the Georgia Jets I planted did wonderfully. The last two years I've planted Beauregard, Nancy Hall, Georgia Jet and another white skinned sweet potato. My yield has been pretty much zero, in spite of watering, mulching, building up that high "hill" that Steele tells me SPs like. I've given them up, I'll just have to buy them, the slips cost about $20 by the time I pay shipping and SPs are less than 50 cents a pound here in season. Definitely not cost effective, as well as frustrating...

I never thought of the night time temps, although I did cover the ground around the plants with black plastic to keep in heat, with no apparent improvement. It's usually in the 50s here at night, even in July and August, and some nights dip into the 40s.

Annie