If you want a compact sweet potato, Amish Bush Porto Rico does pretty well. It is a variant of the old Porto Rico. My personal favorite is Bradshaw aka Mahon. It is a a very good general purpose sweet potato that produces a good crop even in short season areas. Most important, they are much better flavored and have better texture than Georgia Jet. I've also had very good results with Covington which is a recent release that produces much higher quality sweet potatoes than industry standards like Beauregard. Sandhill's business is first come first serve. This is why it is important to order early. It is not a matter of being on a waiting list, you will be on a waiting list if you order from virtually any sweet potato supplier. Get your order in early and Sandhill will almost always ship slips in a 2 week window timed for your location. Mahon is also available from Johnny's this year so if you are ordering from them, consider getting sweet potato plants too.

Paul, you can still eat them. I hope you try it again sometime. Sometimes they come out small and I don't know way, at least in some occasions. Most of mine, this year, came out smaller than usual and my harvest was only about 1/4 of normal. We had a cool wet 1 1/2 months when it would normally have gotten hot. Plus, I didn't turn my vines very much (to prevent rooting and the formation of small roots away from the hill). I didn't weed much at all, as I had a very hectic summer. All these things could contribute to small roots. But... I gave slips to a number of friends, all living nearby. They ALL had wonderful harvests of large roots! One fellow (a newbie), when I mentioned turning vines replied, "Turn vines? I never heard of that!" So, at this point the only variable which is probably unique to me is that of having a very weedy sweet potato patch. I'm not sure. But I'll plant again! George Tahlequah, OK

Good. I was surprised how much cheaper they were than New Hope and that worked out well for me! I have spent so much this spring on garden stuff and just on stuff in 'regular life' so to speak. Hub lost 75 pounds on Medifast since 1/3/13 and that has meant Medifast bills, grocery bills (all fresh veggies) and a new wardrobe including suits. Auto repair and house appliance repair etc. Now I will sell the extra 100 sweet potatoes and leeks I got in bulk to local folk on Craig's List. I needed around 375-400 sweet potatoes but they only come in 100 and 500 breaks. What I hate is that in MN you get your stuff last and that means you get the crap at the end.

Posyplanter, Well, I am referring more in general to the type of soil but if you find a particular spot where they're happy, I think you could grow them there every year. In general, sweet potatoes are very disease-resistant and very few pests bother them in a home garden. So, I grow mine in one of two places (or, sometimes, in both those places) every year and don't really engage in crop rotation since there's little worry that either pests or diseases would build up in the soil. I add compost to the beds every fall/winter to put nutrition back into the soil, but since they're sweet potato beds and rich soil isn't needed/desirable for them, not too much compost....about an inch of compost goes into the sandy soil beds annually. In my case, I really couldn't rotate anyway. We have very thick and dense, brick-red clay that, even when well-amended, is too heavy for sweet potatoes. There is one narrow vein of sandy soil about 30' feet wide that cuts from north to south across our property and runs maybe 60'. Most of that area has trees in it, but I have carved out two small beds between those trees and my main vegetable garden and those beds are reserved for sweet potatoes. To rotate them, I'd have to move them to a raised bed of heavy, improved clay and I'd rather leave them in the sandy soil. I suppose if I ever have problems in the sandy soil, I'll have to either move them to clay the next growing season or skip growing them for a year. By the way, I have been in touch with my sweet potato slip provider this weekend and he tells me it has been a very bad year nationwide for planting sweet potatoes. Remember how wet last year was? Well, lots of commercial growers harvested the sweet potatoes just fine, but the potatoes held over to use as propagation stock for this year must have had either too high of a water content or were harboring some disease (commercial growers, because of monocropping, often see disease issues we home gardeners don't see). When the sweet potato slips were planted this spring, which also was abnormally wet in the sweet potato growing areas, many died and now sweet potato slips apparently are in short supply this year. That really makes me appreciate one of our local growers here in Oklahoma (Duck Creek Farms) even more because Gary did have sweet potato slips for sale this year so at least some of us were able to obtain some before we even knew they were in short supply nationwide. Sweet potatoes only store for maybe 2 to 3 months even in ideal conditions, so it is very difficult and a very complicated process for growers to keep sweet potato propagation stock alive from one fall to the following spring. Since our local grower is one of a small number of people seeking to bring back many heirloom varieties to the market here in the USA, it is especially important that he not lose his propagation stock. Sometimes, I think we home gardeners have it so easy...we buy stuff, plant it, grow it and harvest it and never realize the very hard work that is involved just in having something as 'simple' as sweet potato slips available for us to purchase. Seeing the struggles the commercial growers have gone through this spring with their sweet potato slips has given me a whole new appreciation for the fact that home gardeners like us can just buy slips and plant them. If we have to or want to, we can grow our own slips, but it is unlikely I'd be able to keep 20 heirloom varieties going over the winter every year without a greenhouse or something else. Dawn