Grow Your Own Sweet Potatoes

Have you started your sweet potato slips yet? Now is the best time! 🥔🌱

🌱Start by Valentine's Day

🌱In ground by Mother's Day

🌱Harvest starting Labor Day to 1st Frost

Grow your own! Here's how ⤵️

Get your hands on an organic sweet potato. This part is the most important. You can find organic sweet potatoes in a grocery store like Whole Foods. Get 1 or 2. The reason why organic is important is because it's not likely to have been sprayed with a compound that prevents sprouting on the shoots.

There are 2 different main growing methods for starting sweet potato slips.

One is to grow in soil. Lay your sweet potato flat in a bed of moist soil and expose to some light.

Another is the more common & space saving - to have the potato sit halfway in some filtered water & exposed to some light. A window sill is just fine.

I've done both and get about the same results from each.

After a few weeks you should see some sprouts forming. Once you have sprouts that have leafed out you can carefully separate and store in filtered water to help the roots continue growing.

Plant in ground starting mid-April (after last frost) to Mother's Day! Space plants at least 1-2 ft apart. Keep the roots moist until the plant has established in the soil.

Take your original potato and stick it in some soil. You might get a few more sprouts. Water your starts as needed through the season.

As a bonus, the lush trail of leaves are perfectly edible and delicious to eat raw in a salad or cooked.

Start checking for potatoes readiness around Labor Day and harvest before the 1st frost. They can get too big! You likely don't want giant 3lb potatoes as they aren't the sweetest & can get woody if too big.

Let your potatoes cure 1-2 weeks by sitting out in hot n dry conditions before eating as that is where the sweetness starts crystallizing.

That's it!

Start all over again in the winter. 🌱💕

This is one of last year's potatoes that I left alone after harvesting and it started growing shoots on it's own. I carefully cut off the shoots and put in water. The potato is now in a bed of soil as I am hoping for more shoots.

2 potatoes laying flat in soil

Potato shoots/slips in filtered water to help establish roots

Just set another potato in a glass of filteted water. The top had already started budding out. 🌱💕🥔