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.

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

Sweet potatoes do not like cold ground. For this reason they should be planted after your soil temperatures have warmed up. planting them in raised beds with black plastic covering your beds will certainly help. Also selecting varieties that are early maturing varieties will allow you to plant a little later when the ground is warmer and still make a good crop. For rooted cuttings, 2 weeks or so will give them time to push out new roots. You may take your slips directly from the tubers or you can take tip cuttings from the vine tips. For rooted cuttings a 2" cutting with at least 2 nodes stuck in a half peat half perlite mix and put in a high humidity area under mist and preferably bottom heat. For unrooted cuttings your vine tip cuttings should contain at least 4 nodes (approximately 8-10" long) be sure to trim leaves back to a central stem. One thing to consider is that the tubers over several generations pick up viruses that affect your yields. For this reason all of our plants start out from tissue culture where they are screened for viruses.

That does sound like the right shape and size for the original strain of Seminole. I don't know that I have one specific favorite way to cook them, though I do like to cut them in half and bake them. Then you can season them with whatever spices you like and a little butter or margarine and eat them right out of the shell (or scoop out the meat and mash it and serve it in bowls or on plates). I use Seminole pumpkins in virtually any recipe that calls for sweet potatoes, pumpkins or winter squash. They are very versatile and make great pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread, pumpkin cheesecake or pumpkin muffins. You can use them to make candied yams at Thanksgiving and no one really will realize they aren't yams. They make a great pumpkin soup. I'm going to link an old thread below where I posted a couple of winter squash recipes that I sometimes use for Seminole (or any other winter squash). Then, within the thread linked below, there's another link to a different thread with a couple more recipes, including one dish I made after finding the recipe in Amy Goldman's marvelous book "The Compleat Squash". It is too early and my brain isn't awake yet, but when I think of other squash recipes that aren't included in the thread I'm going to link (or the thread linked inside that link), I'll come back and add them here.