I ordered skips this year from Sand Hill. I don’t expect to see them before 6/10.
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Growing first real garden in nearly 30 years, and got a late start on it, at that, as we were still removing plastic mulch, driptape and irrigation line from last year’s hemp crop well into late May.
But! We pressed the mulch/driptape layer into service…it gathers soil to create a flat-topped raised bed ~26 inches wide(we didn’t use plastic mulch or irrigation for the garden) Probably gonna be ideal for the sweet potatoes, I hope. Seems to be working well for squash, melons, and cowpeas.
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My sweet potatoes have runners 2 to 3 feet long. They had little or no runners last week. I think the heat and humidity finally reached a point the sweet potatoes are happy with.
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i just harvested some of mine! (just wanted to see if they were ready) Runners were massive… several meters long and flowering for quite awhile already. planted April 1st. 9a/8b.
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I do the same! The Asian supermarket sells sweet potato leaves during the winter. I stir fry with garlic and olive oil. How do u cook yours? I root the stems for growing season. So much faster! I do try to root Japanese yams for slips a good few months before early spring.
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I cooked the same way a little oil with garlic stir fry. The stem and leaves can be cooked differently. The stem can stir fry with meat( pork,chicken, beef) and the leaves can also stir fry or add to soup
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You can buy garden sweet potatoes from garden center that can germinate readily. I’ve had success with store purchases varieties. Easily to plant them. Just need some lead time to grow the slips.
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Sweet potato cultivation . . . does not always go as planned. A pretty scanty—and very late—harvest this year, because:
1.) Voles ate most of my newly planted slips and I had to build a new 'tater ridge in a new location and replant with what I had on the very cusp of July. I had never seen that happen before, and this was apparently part of the same bloom of rodents that, during the winter, completely demolished almost every crown of a 70+ plant asparagus bed.
2.) Georgia Jet failed miserably, cracking and rotting despite reasonable amounts of rain this year. I think this is because they were badly scurf infected. When Georgia Jet is badly scurf infected it seems more prone to cracking and contracting secondary rot-inducing pathogens. I dumped about 100 lbs of cracked and stinking Georgia Jets this afternoon. If it had not been for the fact that I had started my own Pumpkin Yam slips, I’d have been out of luck, sweet potato-wise, this year. The Pumpkin Yams, btw, neither cracked nor rotted—nor did they have scurf.
On that note, I will never again buy sweet potato slips from the Steele Plant Company. We bought Georgia Jet and Bonita slips from them last year. These were planted in new ground. But all produced tubers that were heavily scurf infected; we lost most of the Georgia Jets and the survivors of both cultivars didn’t keep well because of the infection. Wanting to get a start of Georgia Jet again, we ordered from Fedco this season, only to find out—before it was too late—that the order was contracted out to the Steele Plant Company. I said, “Well maybe they just had a bad year like everyone else in 2020,” and decided to give the slips a go. I excised the bottoms of every slip in the hope of reducing any inoculum that might be present. But it didn’t work: scurf city, again. And can I blame the Steele Plant Company again? You bet—because the Pumpkin Yams planted on the other end of the same sweet potato ridge were clean.
Speaking of pathogens, I also have persistent problems in storage with a pathogen that causes dry, sunken lesion with dark borders. I assume it is fusarium surface rot, but it could be something else. In any case, like scurf, it seems to erode skin integrity and causes tubers to dry out in storage. In an effort to combat this, I carefully washed and then treated all sweet potatoes with a 3% hydrogen peroxide bath—as I have seen studies that indicate treatment with H2O2 lessens storage rots in both potatoes and sweet potatoes. So we’ll see how that goes.
As for Georgia Jet, I had about ten intact tubers with minor scurf symptoms. If these make it through storage, I will try to get scurf-free slips by starting early, allowing the slips to grow long, then making cuttings or air layers at some distance from the infected tuber.
On a more positive note, I followed the good advice I received from Andrew (@PharmerDrewee) and tried sweet potato greens this year. They’re quite excellent sauteed! So at least we got a little extra mileage out of the sweet potatoes in this way, all problems with the tubers aside!
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Eric, thanks for sharing your experience! I think I will try tthat. Anything that means a little less work is a-ok by me!
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Anyone grow white sweet potatoes? Heard someone rave about how good they are.
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We’ve been growing Bonita for several years and grew Murasaki for the first time this past year. Bonita is a great baker, excellent in hashes, and closer in taste and texture to a regular potato than any other sweet potato we’ve tried. Very productive and a really good keeper as well. Murasaki is sweeter and the taste shares some similarities with orange sweet potatoes. They produced well but haven’t been great keepers so far.
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They’re worth trying. I’ve grown Bonita, too. Very productive here in Kentucky, and one of the earlier whites. They have dry flesh, good sweetness, kind of a pleasant floral note to the flavor—especially when baked. They make good sweet potato fries. Would probably be great in a sweet tater pie, too! (Why do I want to put everything in a pie? 
) For a baking sweet potato, I personally prefer the moister-fleshed orange ones, like Georgia Jet.
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Georgia Jets are a favorite here as well. The best recent sweet potato discovery we’ve made is Becca’s Purple. Purple sweet potato but still relatively sweet and without the bitter taste we’d experienced with the grocery store purples. Only a couple of places offer the slips but worth trying if you can track them down.
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I’ll have to try Becca’s Purple sometime. Thanks for the recommendation! I did try Molokai Purple once, but didn’t care for it; it didn’t really have much flavor to speak of. Maybe it tastes better in Hawaii?
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I’ve grown white sweet potatoes a few times over the years. The last I recall was White Delite. I generally recommend white sweetpotatoes to people who want to make fries or chips. Extra dry varieties work best for this. Sandhill carries a huge selection, caveat that they have many missing this year due to loss in the Derecho. It is amazing how much damage strong winds can do. https://www.sandhillpreservation.com/sweet-potato
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Sweet potato people, I need your help! What sort of pathogen causes this storage disease? Dry, dark sunken patches, often with distinctive, darker borders, sometimes concentric rings:
The lesions sometimes converge:
These are “Pumpkin Yam.” I lost some of them—apparently to desiccation through a loss of skin integrity caused by these lesions—, though most are still very edible; however, when baked, there is a hard, dry spot in the flesh immediately under each lesion, which is somewhat bitter to the taste. “Georgia Jet” was more severely affected; the few I had were destroyed in storage. Bummer.
This is starting to become a recurrent problem here, despite the fact that I’ve been rotating my sweet potato crop. I tried treating with a 3% hydrogen peroxide bath before storage this past season, but this doesn’t seem to have helped a good deal, if at all. Perhaps it is slip-borne (as scurf often is) or maybe it’s just something that is endemic in my soil? Fusarium? Black rot? Any ideas? Possible solutions?
On a more positive note, Pumpkin Yam’s flavor and texture has improved tremendously in storage. Early on, I thought it probably only fit for roasting, fries, and the like, as it was drier and not quite as sweet as Georgia Jet. But the last ones we baked were superb—moist and syrupy sweet—every bit the equal (perhaps even the superior) of Georgia Jet. I also like the shorter habit of its vines. And it puts up with whatever issue I’m having here better than GJ (though it’s certainly far from immune), and seems about as early.
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Anyone raising sweet potatoes this year?
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I had a sweet potato from the grocery store that was starting to sprout, so I cut it into pieces and planted like potatoes. Only one came up. It is a six- inch clump now. I didn’t know about slips. Is there hope my clump will amount to anything by mid-September when we get our first frost? Do they need to reach a certain size before they are edible? Can we just dig them and eat them right away?
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Yes the cuttings root quickly but your pushing it. When in doubt grow them in pots. Most sweet potatoes take 90 -120 days. I think you can cheat and if nothing else people eat the entire plant.
If you grow morning glory you grow sweet potato
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Thanks.
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