Yes the hardware cloth is under the raised bed. I figured they grew a little deeper which is why I was nervous. Ill add a bit more soil to the bed or just mound it up higher in the center to be sure because the soil line is a couple inches below the top of the bed. Thank you for the help I cant wait to bring in a nice sweet potato crop!

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.

As article in Organic Gardening magazine, some years back, about growing potatoes in a bin piqued my interest so I did that. We took 12 feet of 2 x 4 welded with fence fabric and made a circle, 4 feet in diameter, and partly filled that with a mixture of shredded and unshredded leaves, layed some seed potatoes (some that had sprouted in the house while waiting to be eaten) and covered them with more leaves. As the plants grew and the leaves packed down or were digested by bacteria they were replenished until we started harvesting the new potatoes. We plunked 4 potatoes in that bin, maybe we could have done more, but we got quite a harvest from that bin. Tried that once with just straw but the seed potatoes just rotted and I'm still not sure just what went wrong there, unless it was because the depth was not enough.

Nessz, my sweet potatoes grow around my bananas and in raised beds, they all do fine. What Luther is advising you to add is a good idea. My raised beds are filled with a combination of peat moss, black cow and sometimes I add leftover soil from the tomato containers that is mostly pine bark fines. In the summer I spray the tomatoes and with the same organic mixture sometimes I spray the sweets, only if there is a problem. Usually if they are strong enough they will resist any bug attack. For sweet potatoes do not add a high nitrogen soil, otherwise you get pretty leaves and no tubers. Silvia