October Week 1: I still wish it would Pour!

last year

Err. I see what I did (October Week 4)...I'll try to delete that one.

Ok, well, I am grateful for what we got...but darn it's not enough. I'm glad it's cooler, but if it can't be wetter, can it just snow and head toward spring? :) (yes, I know..enjoy fall first?)

It's a Jasper-terrific day, I had an enjoyable walk. The only issue is dog is TOO friendly. He ran into street last night while out to pee, to 'greet'/assault a walker. Then I had to carry him home because he wouldn't leave the kids next door (who don't really want him seems anyway). Geez, I almost wanted to tell kids, beat him with a stick till he goes home (to cure this friendliness issue). Then, I'll end up with a dog that bites kids (how do you win?)

Featured Answer

OklaMoni

last year

She said so much... but never to spray the tators off or not. That's why I asked.

Here is what I saved:

Dawn Coyle Y’all do realize you do not plant whole, intact sweet potatoes? You break off the green vines with leaves on them (known as slips) and plant each of them separately. Each slip will root, grow and form a plant that will then enlarge the storage tubers underground over the course of the summer. In the fall, you harvest the tubers—-those are your sweet potato crop.2

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Manage Sheila Lunski ok, so then why am i rooting it in water?

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Dawn Coyle Some people root the in water just for the fun of it----just to have something green growing indoors in winter. Others will place an unsprouted sweet potato on its side in a container of moist sand and let it begin producing slips there. The folks I know who do this usually start it in March or April in order to have slips by May. If you break off the slips and use them, that same sweet potato will often produce more slips for you to use. (Some potato varieties sprout slips more quickly than others.) You also can buy bundles of slips at some nurseries or garden centers, or online. A couple of great online resources are Duck Creek Farms (an Oklahoma firm) and Sandhill Preservation Center. Both offer many kinds of heirloom sweet potato slips.

Dawn Coyle You can use the method of your choice. They sprout easily if you place the sweet potatoes lengthwise in a pan of moistened soil (for long flat pans you can use disposable aluminum turkey roaster pans, and I have a friend who uses the smallest size of plastic cat litter pans that they sell to sprout his) in a warm room. If you don't have a room that stays pretty warm in winter, you can place the pan on top of seedling heat mat if you have one of those. Or, you can root them in water the traditional way by filling one large jar with water for each sweet potato, poking toothpicks in the middle of the potato and suspending it half in the water and half out of the water. When I do it this way, I place them in my kitchen window so I can keep an eye on them (plus the kitchen has the heat and humidity that speeds this process along). Or (and this is by far my favorite method), if you have sweet potatoes in storage from the previous season, in late March or early April move your selected potato or potatoes to a dark closet in a warm room. (I do this in a spare bedroom on the southeast corner of the house that has two large east-facing window and one south-facing window. It warms up well on sunny days so is perfect for sprouting sweet potatoes.) Put the potato or potatoes in a paper bag or cardboard box for ventilation. Check once or twice a week. You'll usually see small sprouts forming within a couple of weeks. At that time, you can bring the potato back out into the light and let the sprouts grow on. At this point, I put the sweet potato on its side in a pan of moist soil. You will get sprouts at normal room temperature and at normal indoor relative humidity, but perhaps a little more slowly than you expect. Just be patient and it will happen. Sweet potatoes will sprout slips fastest if kept at a room temperature of 75-85 degrees and have high relative humidity (90%), but you'll still get them at lower temperatures. They'll just form more slowly. Some people put a very small space heater and a humidifier in the room where they want to sprout slips in order to maintain the best possible growing conditions, which I suppose is fine if you can do so safely, following all the fire-safe rules for using space heaters. I've never found it necessary to do that because of that warm, sunny bedroom. If you are going to use a purchased sweet potato that is not organic, I'd buy it in January or early February and store it in a dark closet. Why? Because generally conventionally-grown potatoes and sweet potatoes are treated with anti-sprouting chemicals to prevent them from sprouting while in storage or on store shelves and you may need to keep that sweet potato in storage for a while so they anti-sprouting chemicals can wear off (eventually, they do) before you try to sprout your slips. If you purchase an organic sweet potato, you shouldn't have any trouble getting it to sprout.

Dawn Coyle For long-term storage, cure them at 90 degrees Fahrenheit and 85% relative humidity for 5 to 7 days. Had you harvested as early as Dennis Ringwald did, you probably would have had that sort of heat and humidity naturally, but we're cooler now. Sometimes I cure sweet potatoes in my hoophouse type greenhouse because it can reach those temperatures and relative humidity even with shadecloth on it and the vents open. Or, if you have a sunroom, that usually is a great place to cure them, but out of direct sunlight. You want to use the warmth and humidity to your advantage in a room like that, but without subjecting the sweet potatoes to too much direct sunlight. Since it is cooler now outdoors, just do the best you can to cure them at relatively warm temperatures and high humidity---you can create your own humidity like Dennis did. During the curing process, the starches convert to sugar, giving you better flavor. If you cure at lower temperatures, around 80 degrees for example, it can take a couple of weeks for their starches to properly convert to sugar. After they have cured, you can store them at a lower temperature in a cool, dry location---in the back corner of a walk-in pantry or in boxes under the bed or in the closet of a spare bedroom, for example. It is preferable to have them in an area where the relative humidity doesn't vary too wildly. Properly cured, they will last in dry storage for months. When you cure them, watch them for any nicks and cuts to heal. If you have any with that sort of damage, even after curing, it is best to use them first.

Dawn Coyle Ornamental sweet potatoes are the same as edible sweet potatoes so they all grow the same and all will produce edible tubers under the right conditions. The difference is that edible sweet potatoes have been selected and cultivated for the eating quality of their tubers and ornamental sweet potatoes have been selected and cultivated for the beauty of their foliage. So, while your ornamental sweet potatoes will produce a tuber, it might not be of good eating quality. You can overwinter ornamental sweet potatoes indoors, either with foliage on them or in a dormant state. When the growing conditions warm up, the overwintered tuber will begin to leaf out, assuming it didn't rot. If you leave your ornamental sweet potatoes outdoors, the tuber generally rots over the course of the winter because the tubers cannot tolerate the cold temperatures. I have overwintered ornamental sweet potato tubers, out side of the pot of soil, by just removing them from the soil-less mix in the pot in autumn, leaving them out lying on a table on top of a few layers of newspaper to dry out, and then putting them back in the darkest corner of the pantry to overwinter. You then can pot them up, keep them warm, and they'll leaf out when they are ready. Don't move them outdoors until late April or May depending on what your temperatures are doing because they are tender, warm-season plants that cannot tolerate cold. You can buy them as transplants in the spring once the weather is fairly warm. You won't see them real early because they need heat.

To be clear, in case you get conflicting messages on when to harvest, you can harvest your sweet potatoes any time the tubers are a usable size, so when to harvest is up to you. The key is to harvest before soil temperatures drop to 50 degrees to avoid chill injury to the potatoes. It also is better to harvest them in advance of a big rain storm if one is forecast for around the time you intend to harvest because they'll cure and store better if they were not overly wet when harvested. One reason to harvest slightly earlier would be that you'd have temperatures at or above 80 degrees for curing them. If you harvest later in the season and the temperatures already have dropped significantly, you might have to cure them indoors in the warmer indoor temperatures. Much of your timing really depends on where you live in Oklahoma and on when the autumn weather cools off significantly there.

Oh, and I think a lot of people don't understand the sweet potatoes must be cured and skip that step, which is a mistake. I think a lot of newer gardeners might not realize curing is necessary for the starches to break down and develop into the sugars that give the sweet potatoes their characteristic sweetness.

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