A shot in the dark -- The Lowes in Kitty Hawk has them. They did a week ago, anyway. Where are you in NC? Maybe your local Lowes or other big store would have them? Or, you could drive to Kitty Hawk, buy your sweet potatoes, spend a few days at the beach, and go home and plant them :) This post was edited by elisa_Z5 on Thu, Jun 13, 13 at 10:18

Hi, I had directions for starting slips e-mailed to me by "Gwen in LA". Hopefully she won't mind if I post her directions here. "I start the potatoes growing by laying them on damp perlite, and waiting for them to sprout. Laying them on their sides, about 1/3 of the way down in perlite (or clean sand). When the sprouts are about 8" long, push them off the tuber with your thumb, and transplant in good friable soil, with about 3" of tip and several leaves showing. Water immediately, and keep damp. In a few weeks they will start to 'run', making long vines." And I think that Steve does ship within California. He's located in Vista CA (2508-B East Vista Way) which is north of San Deigo and south of Los Angelos off of the I-5 freeway. Exotica's phone number is 760-724-9093. And amazingly I have been given the name of another source ofsweet potato slips in California (By Charles, a member of the North County San Deigo Rare Fruit Growers). It is called the "House of Alvernaz, 5381 Arena Way, P.O. Box 474, Livingston, CA 95334". Good luck! Richard Primbs Encinitas (Leucadia) CA

Gary, So far, we like every variety and have no complaints. They've all been good so far. I haven't seen a single, storage issue of any sort and that's wonderful because lately I've been too busy to cook much of anything except brownies and cookies for the firefighters. I think I've baked 9 batches in the last two weeks. Some varieties are starting to leaf out a little bit the last week or so. I'm going to make a sweet potato pie or cobbler this weekend or on Monday for Tuesday's fire meals. (I guess if there are no big fires on Tuesday, which is unlikely, Tim and I will have to force ourselves, lol, to eat the whole pie or cobbler ourselves.) Fire activity is on the rise here, especially in our part of the county and we've had units out at fires pretty much every day. About the only time I'm "guaranteed" there won't be a fire is really early in the day when humidity is highest and wind is low. I'm having a hard time getting anything done, inside or outside, and feel like my seed-starting, planting and transplanting is falling behind more and more every day. Every time I step foot in the garden, the fire pagers go off so I'm almost afraid to step foot in the garden, but I'm about to go out there and work anyway (or at least attempt to work) since this will be the last day we have in the 70s for a few days. We're expecting frost here on Sun. a.m., and likely a light freeze (hopefully not a heavy one) as well, but I haven't put anything in the ground yet that cannot handle frost or a light freeze. Dawn

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