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Vegetable Gardening

sweet potatoes - for next year

strawberryjohnjohn

13 years ago

Before the frost hit I took 15 cuttings from this year's sweet potato plants. They are about the size of the slits I started with. I put each one in their own gallon milk jug. I'm hoping they well grow and give me about 100 slits for next year's garden. Do you think this well work or should I just take a few sweet potatoes and put them in a water jar and hope they well give me the 100 slits I am looking for? thanks JOHN

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Comments (3)

bejay9_10
13 years ago
Zone SS 23-24, CA.

I can't answer your question - but it sounds reasonable enough. The vines seem to put out roots very easily. However, as long as you probably harvested them, I'd put a few into jars (toothpick method) anyway, just to be sure. The vines seem to like putting down new roots all along the long stems, so why not see how many rootlets you can salvage too.

I dug quite a few of mine today, and was pleasantly surprised. I didn't pull the vines completely, because they are perennial here - so they tell me. I plan to see how long I can continue to dig a few at a time, while allowing the vines to keep on producing.

This is my first experience with them, and I really like the idea. The tubers are now curing on the back porch, along with a couple of Hubbard squashes, as they tell me curing makes them taste better.

Bejay
strawberryjohnjohn
Original Author
13 years ago
I took 15 cuttings just before frost and put each slip into a wine bottle. A week later the roots from the slips just about filled the wine bottles. So, I took two 5 gallon buckets filled them with water and tied them around the rim with the roots in the bucket and the leaves outsde. So far so good...JOHN
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About starting your own slips....go to my blog. I just started a sweet potato in water about a week ago and it already has roots and 2 little slips coming out. Yeah! After the slip (about 6 inches long) has grown from the potato you snap it off and place it in some water and let that root. You will get several slips from one potato, so you won't need to have potatoes all over the place. When it is warm enough out, plant it outside. You don't need to bury the potato in the ground. Go see me potato....www.howmygardengrows.wordpress.com Here is a link that might be useful: How my garden grows!
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We boil 3 cups mash them with 1cup brown sugar,2eggs,1/2 cup milk(vanilla coffee creamer is better),1/2 cup butter. Put in casserole dish and top with this mixture. 1 cup brown sugar, 1/3 cup flour, 1 /3 cup melted butter, 1 cup chopped pecans. Sprinkled it over the top of sweet potatoes and bake at 350 for 30 -40 min. We like to double the topping. But you might want to try it single batch first if you are not into rich cause it is dessert rich. No calories either!!!I also like to just bake them cut them open and put in butter and Cinnamon.
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Well, I'm struggling to keep up with all the things "I have to get done." But I did dig another two varieties of sweet potatoes this last Saturday. One (Cordner, not to be confused with Cordner's Red) didn't do well at all. Here's a picture: It looks almost as if it was overloaded by nitrogen. But I don't believe I did anything different in the part of the row where Cordner grew. On either side of it were varieties which did exceedingly well. The other, Grand Asia did amazingly well. The roots were mainly very large, and there were A LOT of them. This variety is similar to the native sweet potato we knew when we lived in HIdalgo Mexico, which was called "Camote Morado," translated, "Purple Sweet Potato." I am cooking one of them now in order to say how they taste. Camote Morado was drier than most American cultivars and if not cooked just right, it wasn't very sweet. But when cooked slowly it could be sweet and very delicious. I requested Grand Asia from Duck Creek Farms, last year, because we miss the sweet potatoes we had in Mexico. The largest root of Grand Asia weighed in at 4 lb, and that was from a late planting! Here's a picture of Jerreth holding two clusters (from two plants) of Grand Asia.
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You can harvest the tips for greens anytime during the growing season. I would recommend that if you plan to use them for greens that you plant a dedicated row for that purpose as frequent harvesting will reduce root formation. I would recommend varieties such as 8633 or bunch Porto Rico since they have shorter internode length and you get more leaves in a shorter area, however you can use any variety.
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pnbrown
13 years ago
John, we just had a somewhat contentious thread about whether useful advice can be given to folks like yourself who not only don't list their region of north america but do not even give the hardiness zone.

You mention having frost recently, so that is a clue. Probably you are in a zone 5-7, but it'd be easier if you tell us. Anyway, if that is the case, my guess is that sweet potato plants arent going to live until mid-june in a bucket of water inside a house or greenhouse with little natural light and much lower temps than they like. Even if they did, it's easier to simply store the tubers and use a couple in May to sprout new slips.

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