Grow sweet potatoes in your own backyard Sweet potatoes are usually harvested 120 to 180 days after transplanting. They should be harvested with care, since skins are thin and delicate. Sweet potatoes aren't consumed immediately after harvest. Potatoes should be cured in a warm and humid area for five to 10 days. After curing, potatoes should be kept in a cool and dry area. http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Nov/24/il/FP611240317.html You can dig into the ground to check the sweet potatoes to see whether it is ok to harvest after 4 or 5 months. I harvested my regular sweet potatoes about 5 months after transplanted. I keep some small sweet potatoes underground overwinter and keep some in my garage too, it will grow again when the temperate get warm again from the roots, we have frost and hard freeze too in the winter. If your area is no frost, you can have some cuttings now and grow them, they will continue to grow until next year. I bought the Okinawan sweet potatoes from the flea market here and tried to grow many times, but failed. Where did you get the Okinawan sweet potatoes? This post was edited by JCTsai on Mon, Sep 29, 14 at 19:30

Well, I chunked up my purple taters, peeled them, boiled them, and then I put them in the blender. I was trying to mush them enough so I could make a pie filling. However, those things kept getting thicker and thicker, and so I added some nice fat free half and half....and instead of sugar, I put in a cup of Splenda. And the color is the most gorgeous lavender. I've done no further cooking, but it takes a big spoon to dip this out of the blender container. I think about 48 ounce size too. And my parrots love it, the dogs love it, and I love it. I mean, what is not to like about this smooth concoction, which tastes and has the texture of a pudding. I did not add any vanilla, but I suppose I could have but I wanted to see the taste of the natural sweet potato. Also, I could have left out the Splenda and had a veggie smoothie. I've downloaded a book on my Kindle which is a book about making green smoothies, out of raw foods. The blessed thing about such food, so many of the green foods are "free" foods that do not count against your diet if you are diabetic. That is one reason I've begun eating more dill pickles, sauerkraut, jalapenos, mustard on any sandwich, and then the SaraLee 10 carb whole wheat sliced bread....sometimes just one slice for an open faced sandwich. But the green smoothies are espousing the raw food diet, going beyond vegan to raw, and eliminating cooked foods of any kind. You can go part way with this sort of diet, which is what I would do, but I will give it a go because by eating raw greens, I've already lost 8 pounds. Hard to take it off, but great when it happens.

When we would grow our own, I found that the white sweet potatoes do not store well, so never grew them again. We never ever called either of them yams. However, growing up, my Grandma and Mother both called green sweet peppers, mangoes and many old recipe books also called them that. So when you know the difference you call them by their right name. Happy Thanksgiving, Sue

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.