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

Dorothy, It has worked for a long time. Maybe for 7 or 8 years now. I've never once had a deer jump it, but on the rare occasion that I've left the gate open at night (OOPS!), I have come outside in the early morning around sunrise and found deer in the garden. Because they saw me (and even though I quickly retreated indoors to avoid frightening them), they wouldn't leave though the gate, and did manage by repeatedly jumping to eventually get over the top of the fence from inside the garden. They did a lot of damage during their mad stampede of running around wildly inside the garden trying repeatedly to jump the fence. I learned a lesson then about double-checking the gate at night to make sure it was closed and firmly latched. Everyone I know here has had success with an 8' fence, but I know that in some parts of the country, it takes a 10' fence. Some years I have had deer loitering just outside the garden fence repeatedly, sometimes even when they could clearly see me inside the garden (Hint: always close the gate behind yourself or you may find a deer coming in through the gate while you're inside the garden, and guess how I know that). I felt like those deer absolutely were planning to jump the 8' fence and I was worried they might succeed, so I tied white Wal-mart bags to the fence at roughly a deer eye level. I think any white material would work, it is just that at that point in time, white Wal-Mart bags were what I had. I tied them every 6' or 8'. They were tied so that they would flutter in the breeze. Because white-tailed deer use their white tails to signal danger to one another, I was hoping white fluttering bags would send a "Danger! Flee!" signal to any deer contemplating jumping the fence. It seemed to work. Those loitering deer went away. I thought that maybe one reason my 8' fence worked in the front garden was because the woodland comes up almost to the fence on two sides (north and west) and the driveway is on the south side, with the barbed wire property line fence just a few feet south of the driveway. I figured that at least on those three sides, deer found it hard to get a running start to leap an 8' fence. The east side had no real obstructions, but it slopes downhill which might discourage jumping the fence from that side. When we built the new back garden three years ago, we put up a sturdier woven wire fence than we have in the front garden. We used landscape timbers for poles and a very heavy gauge woven wire fencing material. That garden has wide-open land on all sides and I was worried deer would jump that fence because several deer trails run though that area. They've never made it over that 8' fence and into the garden, and I've never even seen any sign that they've tried. I've also noticed that the professional game/hunting ranches both here in our county and across the Red River in Montague County, TX, have 8' high fences, so they must find that the 8' high fences keep their deer contained within. However, those game ranches mostly have heavy timber along the fence lines and that might help keep their deer from jumping since the trees are so close to their fences. Dawn

So Peter reading your post I decided that it is the time to harvest sweet potatoes. This is my first attempt to grow them. I bought 8 pack starter flat at the end of June. I wanted to fill the space left from the spring vegetables. I planted 4 of them in the vegetable bed and the other 4 in the different spots with pumpkins and melons. The last 4 did not receive any care, grew slowly and were overwhelmed by pumpkins and melons. Those in the vegetable bed had drip irrigation and more sun and at the end of the season the vines were everywhere. I really thought that the ones in the vegetable bed will have better crop. But when I dag them out I did not find any difference. In both cases there were some potatoes but not very many of them, they were immature because of their thin skin. And I was not surprised given that I planted them quite late. It feels like they could grow a couple months longer. But one plant really surprised me. The root on this one was HUGE, it partially stack out of the ground surface. This plant had no actively growing vines, just some sprouts on top. It was also heavily shaded by the overgrown okra. But it looked mature and ripe. And now I am wondering what was different for this potato plant and for the others, which were growing in the same vegetable bed, but mainly grew vines but not roots.

Sweet!!!