Sweet Potato Slips???

[HunkieDorie23]

OK went on ehow.com to see how to grow sweet potatoes and it recommended getting sweet potatoes from the store and using them to start slips. I know you can't use regular potatoes from the store can you use sweet potatoes?????

Does anyone else do this?

 

[lesa]

You can use potatoes or sweet potatoes from the store if you choose organic ones. I tried sweet potatoes once, just for fun. Do you remember the school project, where you poked a toothpick into the potato and balanced it in a cup of water? Mine grew pretty well- but I started them way too early and they petered out before spring. Give it a try- if nothing else it gives you something to watch growing, until you can dig in the dirt! Just did the same thing with an avocado seed this morning!

 

[HunkieDorie23]

I am not sure if we have organic potatoes here. We usually have one choice of sweet potato in the produce department. Sweet potatoes are not hugely popular here. Rural Ohio doesn't have the selection that you might have in Upstate NY. One draw back to the quiet life. We used to live just outside of DC and that is the only draw back. I'll start watching for them when I go out of town. Athens might have organic. Thanks.

 

[journey11]

Feed stores should have them closer to spring (for planting, not eating). One of ours even has several varieties to choose from. But if all else fails, you can get what you want online or in a catalog.

 

[hoodat]

Sweet potatos are somethimes sprayed with a compound to keep them from sprouting in the store but it eventualy wears off. Organic sweet potatos cannot be sprayed and still be called organic. Look for sweet potatos that are starting to show tiny buds on them. Those can be grown for sprouts. The old fashioned (and still best) way to start slips is to use a cold frame and use enough sand to cover the sweet potato. When the sprouts form you pop them off right against the tuber and root them in a small pot such as you would use for seeds. They root in only a few days and are ready to go into the ground. As alrady noted you can also suspend them in water and get shoots but they won't be as strong as those from a cold frame.
Timing is everything. Don't start them so early the ground is too cool for the new shoots.

 

[HunkieDorie23]

I have to check at the feed store. I know they had some last year but I thought they looked terrible but I have never seen them before so maybe that is what they are supposed to look like. I was hoping to do my own because I thought I could do better.

 

[wifezilla]

I took a garnet sweet potato I bought at Vitamin Cottage last year and got great slips off of it. Not enough of a growing season to get a big harvest, but it was an experiment and I did get some descent sweet potatoes out of it

This year I am going to order a variety more suited to my zone.

 

[Ridgerunner]

last year I got a Japanese and a garnet from a local Natural Foods store and stuck them in water. You can see my set-up below.

Sweet potatoes are a warm weather crop. Thyey simply will not grow unless they are warm. I've had them rot trying to sprout them in a cold room. I keep mine on top of a bookcase since hot air rises. Some people use the top of a refrigerator.

Sweet potatoes are pretty easy to grow. They do take quite a while to develop. I know the days listed doesn't mean a lot, but it is a way to compare which ones develop faster. The faster developing varieties are recommended for further north. Best I remember, Beauregard, Georgia Jets, and O'Henry's are some of the earlier-developing varieties.

Sweet potatoes are easy to grow as long as the ground is warm enough. I've stuck sweet potato slips with no roots in the ground, watered them well, and they usually live and grow well. Last year, one of the slips grew longer than I wanted to set it out, thinking that it had too much growth for the root to support, so I cut the top half of the slip off and stuck it in a wet part of the garden. It lived and developed sweet potatoes. Here is some of what I grew this past year. The orange-colored ones are the Garnet. the red are the Japanese. The whites are O'Henry's.

 

[seedcorn]

what types tend to give you long narrow vs. fat sweet potatoes? I like to fry them so like longer varieties.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I'm sure there are some varietal differences, but the way I understand it, if it is wet when the potato is forming, they will be long and skinny. If it is dry, they get really thick.

Most of the recommendations for spacing I've seen is in rows about 3 feet apart and spaced about 12" to 15" apart in the rows. That seems tight the way the vines run, but those vines are going to cover everything within 4 or 5 feet anyway. I would have suspected you could get some control over sizes by how far apart you set them out, but I have not experienced that. If one variety grows long and skinny, they all seem to.

I will mention that the largest, thickest variety I have ever grown was the Georgia Jets. I also had O'Henry's and White Yams that year and they produced some pretty large sweet potatoes, but the Georgia Jets were larger.