I put some unused slips last May in water on the outside table. They grew well all summer until frost. I kept about 3 inches of water in them and fed them about every 2 weeks with some liquid Miracle Grow in the yellow bottle.

Thanks for the reply, I'm referring specifically to overwintering. As around April-May is the normal time to plant them here, it makes sense that extra slips would survive during the summer; their natural growing period. I'd like to know if they'd survive only in water during the winter, indoors. I know people plant them in pots with soil to overwinter, but I've yet to find information on keeping them in nothing but water for the overwintering period.

As with any other plant, growing it in a sufficiently large enough container of potting mix will be far more plant-healthy than in just plain water. Even hydroponic growers who use primarily water have to add nutrients regularly and keep the pH balanced, etc.

So no, keeping them "in nothing but water" while over-wintering them isn't the best approach.

That said, there really is no reason to over-winter them when fresh, healthier spring slips are so easy to grow. That's unless they are a rare variety.

Dave

Thanks Digdirt, I agree that it'd probably be easier to just get slips from potatoes in the spring. The problem is I've never tried this with these varieties. I don't know if they're "Rare" but they're certainly not easy to get.

The Okinawan sweet potatoes were really difficult to find and I had to resort to getting them from a guy on ebay (he was the only person who had them) after the one online website I bought them from basically said "sorry, our crop failed, try next year". This was from rareseeds.com, which I found to be the only seller that year. I guess it only being on "rare"seeds, suggests they are in fact sort of rare, don't know.

The Murasaki Japanese Sweet potatoes are a little easier to get, but tend to ship late. I live in North Texas, so we're used to Beauregard's and such, but these Japanese varieties (super delicious by the way) are unknown territory for me, and just too difficult (and expensive) to obtain again.

Organic versions of these potatoes are impossible to find since both of these varieties are irradiated at the supermarket. I've yet to find anyone that sells these at a farmers market as well.

My crop this year wasn't great since they got started late due to issues with the suppliers, and I got maybe only 3 or 4 meal sized potatoes (of each variety) and a lot of tiny little tubers. So basically I have no idea how this crop will do as far as giving me slips next spring. There's a lot of "firsts" going on here, and I'm also curing them for the first time as well. If I have to plant them in soil, I'll do so, it's just they're so much easier to get going in water and I'm afraid I'll lose my cuttings if I transplant them. They're taking on great (root-wise) in water right now, but some of the leaves are starting to yellow, don't really know why. 5 months is a long time to overwinter though, so I guess I'll just try to cover all my bases and plant some in soil, keep some in water and hope I get slips from the tiny tubers next spring.

I know this is an old post, but was wondering if the OP tried it and how it worked out? I am trying the same experiment this year myself. What I think I will do come spring is take pieces from the water grown vine and root those to plant. Should get more vine that way and won’t have the issues of untangling all the roots in the vase.