Sweet Potato Cultivation - Propagation

I dug the last potatoes on weekends. Below are the last of my purple and sweet potatoes. Not very much, I had only 5 plants and they received zero attention from me.
I grew the sweet potatoes from my own slips this year. It was super easy. I just the put the tiny slips without roots in the soil under drip line in the crowded tomato bed in the hot July. It was done out of curiosity, because I did not expect them to thrive. They surprisingly survived and grew well. The soil under tomatoes was so soft that I just pulled the potatoes from it without digging.
Next year Iā€™ll plant sweet potatoes as a second crop after garlic, because this bed stayed empty for the half of the summer, after I harvested garlic.

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@MuddyMess_8a,
If I get a chance I thought I would bring in a sweet potato plant less the potatoes to overwinter in the house. Next spring I could make hundreds of slips very quickly. Sunlight I realize will be a problem. Iā€™m more concerned with soil born diseases and white flies. I figured to avoid soil diseases I would just grow them in water , a grow light for light, seven spray for the insects. What are your thoughts does it sound like a good idea? I could grow them in sand if thatā€™s to long in water. I like these sweet potatoes they were wonderful! Flesh is very sweet and moist with a rich sweet potato flavor. In the meantime I put the sweet potato plant in a 55 gallon drum of water and itā€™s growing fine! I will need to trim it since itā€™s 6 feet long.

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Hello @MuddyMess_8a, a ? 4 Uā€¦

Today Mrs Dood dug up a few more sweet taters. Some of them look like they were munched on by something, maybe voles or mice. Can these bite marks be cut out and the taters cured like a non-injured one? Will the cut out part heal/cure over? Or should they just be pitched?

We are curing the ones we dug up last week in the bathroom tub, as itā€™s the warmest place right now available. We canā€™t keep a temp of >80 and high humidity in there, maybe closer to 75Ā° and 50%. How long will it take to cure them in these less than optimum conditions?

Thanks.

My plants never got very big. Probably because they got munched by rabbits multiple times, but even so I was hoping for more growth from them. We dug them up yesterday.

In picture:

Upper left - Molokai Purple
Center top - Laceleaf; these got some kind of root maggot and I had to toss most of the bigger tubers.
Upper right - Apache
Center Bottom - Korean Purple

We plan on cooking and eating the greens too. Laceleaf was less appealing to the rabbits, but also got more bugs in the tubers and the greens are less appealing to me for eating.

Iā€™ll probably try Apache and Korean Purple again next year in a different spot with more anti-rabbit measures.

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The plant only made 1 tater, but itā€™s bigger than my wifes hand. Probably going to be stringy and not fit to eat.

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Sweet potatoes are one thing I have never tried to grow, assuming we are too far north, almost in zone 3. Has anyone in the north tried them?

I think the longer they are in the ground the bigger they get. You may not have time for them to get very large.

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Weā€™ve grown them the last few years. They are a beautiful plant and you can use the leaves like spinach, which is nice in the hot part of the summer when most greens struggle. Tuber wise however they have been pretty small, until this year when my wife just happened to put 2 of the plants next to a retaining wall I just built- the tubers got really nice sized. My theory is the block absorbed the heat and kept the soil temperature warmer both during the day and at night. Weā€™re excited to try again next year with maybe 7 or 8 plants. We got several pounds this year from those 2 plants and they were delicious!

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Thanks, Klondike, maybe I will try a couple plants. I always like to experiment. I could put some cement silo staves next to them to see if that helps retain heat.

Iā€™ll take stringy over baby-food any day.

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The big ole tater turned out smooth and creamy in a sweet potato casserole we had for Thanksgiving. It surprised me how good and sweet it was.

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Yeah, in my experience I havenā€™t noticed much difference at all between different sized potatoes when other variables were the same.

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Thanks for the review. Iā€™ve not been a big fan of sweet potatoes, but they are so easy to grow. Iā€™ll have to try to find some of the Nancy Hall to see if Iā€™d enjoy them more.

Anne, if I were to recommend just one variety for you, Iā€™d probably recommend Porto Rico over Nancy Hall. Although it really shined in that one taste test I mentioned, every taste test is a little different, and I would rank Porto Rico at least as high if I averaged all the years together, so I donā€™t want to give the impression that Porto Rico is even slightly inferior. Theyā€™re both great and so similar theyā€™re very hard to even tell apart. Iā€™m inclined to recommend Porto Rico, though, because in my experience itā€™s more productive and yields a little better percentage of nice size, nice looking potatoes. It also may be a little bit easier to find. If under your conditions Porto Rico tastes anything like it does for me, you certainly wonā€™t have gone wrong with it (or with Nancy Hall.) Thereā€™s a world of difference between them and what most people are used to for sweet potatoes in the US.

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Thanks for the detailed review, Eric. Our pics of the sweet taters earlier in this thread were Beauregard. We got them from Walmart and put 18 plants into the ground. Once I built a deer proof fence around them, they took off. We harvested maybe 40lb from the 15 plants that survived.

They have a good flavor, I guess, but Iā€™m not much of a SP connoisseur. This was the first year we were able to get any to do anything. Mrs Dood made a SP casserole out of them and it was very good. We still have a big tote of them sitting in our cellar.

Might venture out and maybe try some different ones next season, like you suggested, especially the Porto Rico or Nancy Hall. Just wonder who would be selling these.

Thanks Eric for all the info.
Iā€™ve never grown a bush sweet potato, only vines. How much room do they take up? Iā€™ve trained these vines up a tomato cage to try to contain them and conserve space so a bush might be ideal.
Whenever I have ordered slips theyā€™ve looked pitiful almost DOAā€¦ And then I read about this new method from one of your linksā€¦

We will also use the newer and accepted practice adopted by universities and large commercial growers by supplying ā€œcutsā€. This is where the slips are cut off at soil level and shipped without roots and some of the leaves also removed. It adds an extra layer of disease control and gets the slips into a more desired size for shipping and reduces stress. They are also packed rather dry, so will be wilted and possibly yellowed. The cuts will root very fast after being planted and kept moist/wet for a few days.

Have you gotten slips like this? I mean just stems? Honestly, I wish they would just send me one potato to make my own slips.

That is a dream come true. Mine plants have always been eaten to the ground or pulled out by voles or rabbits.

I guess we donā€™t have vole or rabbit issues around here, our main culprits are the $@#%&*ing deer. Iā€™ve seen some bunnies around, but I think our dog keeps them at bay. With the deer? Not so muchā€¦

I donā€™t really worry about how much sweet potatoes vine out, because Iā€™m mostly planting multiple rows, and itā€™s fine if they grow into and over each other. I plant my rows 3-1/2 to 4ā€™ apart. Some varieties probably grow twice that far in each direction, maybe even more. But the Porto Ricos just barely close the aisles, I would say.

Anne, I donā€™t know about that quote. Sweet potatoes are incredibly tough, though. Iā€™ve put tiny pieces of vine in the ground with no roots and so long as they get halfway decent moisture to get started they mostly make it. Although Iā€™ve used slips without roots, theyā€™ve always been fresh from my own bedded potatoes. Iā€™ve never bought slips without roots.

If I were to experiment with just a couple plants up here near Minneapolis, would Porto Rico be a good one to try? Can one buy just a couple slips? I like to experiment, but many of my experiments havenā€™t panned out.