im doing grow bags this year. i’ll post my harvest so people can decide how it went lol. plentiful leaves rn
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I bought the same kind and one sprouted in the bag! I collected slips and planted them so I’m hoping I get a ok harvest, it’s pretty late in the season but I have until October, maybe even November before we get frost. If anything the humming birds will enjoy the flowers.
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You might have time to get a few to start slips for 2027.
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I did several wrong or you could say that I have many things that I could have done better growing these sweet potatoes. Even with my lack of good growing practices I dug 1 vine up this morning and it had 4 potatoes under it. The picture makes these look bigger than they are. The largest one is still a little smaller than what I consider a good cooking size. At my location we usually don’t get any frost until mid Oct-early Nov so I’m guessing I can wait to dig the others for another 45 days or so. Do you think the 45 days is long enough for the others to get up to a good cooking size?
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i start checking size on mine the end of August, in other words, now. I checked a couple of days ago and they are similar in size to yours, i.e. not ready yet. Only very early fast growing varieties are mature now. Georgia Jet for example could be harvested. It is the fastest growing variety I know of. Most varieties mature sometime in mid to late September. The key is to not let the vines get frosted. Wait until frost is imminent and then harvest them. Why no frost? Vines that have been frosted produce off flavors in sweet potatoes. They taste bad.
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Thanks
I did a bit of experimenting with sweet potatoes, my experience..
First, you must prepare the soil patch you want them to grow in. I added compost mixed with the soil, the soil must not be able to compact.
Fastest is to take stems and bury them in the soil with only the leaves sticking out, only the growing end remain on top of the soil. Starting with a sprouting sweet potato is very slow.
Every leaf along the vine is a grow node that will (attempt to) make a root which is a sweet potato.
The vines grow on top of the soil, these you navigate and burry with only the leaves sticking out, and only the growing end remains on top of the soil.
I also added wood chips so the soil would remain damp and as it becomes compost feed the plants.
I did only a 1m x 1m patch and it produced about four buckets of reasonable sized sweet potatoes.
The foliage grew out of control and was around 600mm high.
I have a sprayer watering the little patch automatic once a day just after dark.
The sweet potatoes I grew looks the same verity as Auburn’s in the picture above.
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Fanie, you are asking for scurf in your sweet potatoes. Compost should not be used to prepare for planting them.
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Nice job on the patch it is very clean.
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Dug my sweet potatoes today; nine Murasaki slips. First time growing this variety. Everything I had read said these yield lower than the other commercial stand by varieties like Beauregard and Covington. Yield is indeed about a 1/3 lower than usual for me. But I’ve bought these from a Trader Joe’s once and loved the taste. Kind of a nutty/vanilla on top of regular sweet potato flavor. These flowered much more than other varieties; was a haven for pollinators all summer.
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I would have let those grow another 2 weeks if possible. Sweet potatoes don’t stop getting bigger until the vines get frosted. Harvest when they are as big as you want or just before frost, whichever comes first.
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Sweet potato leaves are a lot more nutrient than the sweet potatoes itself.
checked my molokai for size since they are drying out really rapidly (which to me hopefully means theres more potatoes than soil in its grow bag) but this guy was at the surface. at least this confirms we have tuber formation! slightly smaller than I want but a solid side none the less, about 5-6 inches long and 2 inches wide. Not bad for a northern climate!
I wasnt sure this and okinawa would produce at all. look forward to seeing the yield in a month
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That is considered ideal size for baking.
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I like a little more. Not much though
That’s impressive for beginning of September! I have been watching my sweet potato garden daily for thieves. 4 out of the last 5 years I come back now to find voles moved in and virtually all stolen. I think mice also join because there are usually holes at the top. I’m only seeing evidence of squirrel doing bs squirrel sht all over the top (of every garden HATE SQUIRREL) but I don’t like how loose the vines are in half the garden. It’s either squirrel ripping them off the roots or it’s because the tubers are gone there. We spent days in spring obsessively lining this bed with multiple layers of hardware cloth, but history has me paranoid! Just totally desperate for a good harvest again, but I let them go until closer to end October.
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This is a selection I got from the USDA. It’s one I’m particularly interested in because it’s reported drought tolerance and disease resistance. I went ahead and harvested one a little early because of all the vole damage I’m seeing this year. A consequence of the extra rain we’ve had making it hard to keep up with grass and weeds in the rows.
Still, a couple of clean medium sized roots that should store well and give me some seed potatoes to work with next year and evaluate further.
Red skin, cream/yellowish flesh
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I dug up a couple of the Korean gungoguma sweet potatoes this evening. The largest is 645 grams (1.4 pounds). It looks like each plant has between 2 and 4 developed tubers though many are still under sized. I will wait at least 2 more weeks to harvest so they can get a bit larger.
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Moles do not eat plants. If something is eating the sweet potatoes underground, it may be something else, but not the moles.
Moles do more good than bad. Wish I had some. I don’t care about “lawn”, which has become an obsession with some people.