Grow Your Own Sweet Potato Slips Indoors

Take a whole sweet potato, stick a toothpick in each side of the potato and suspend it in a jar of water, so that one end of the potato is sticking down into the water.  Set it in a sunny window and in a few days it will start to sprout. Then proceed with this next step:

• If you have sweet potatoes from last year's garden that are starting to sprout  like I do, you can just cut off the parts of the sweet potato that are sprouting and place them in a tray of water in a sunny window or under lights.  Use the rest of the sweet potato to make something yummy for supper.  Once the slips start to grow leaves and roots you can plant them in some seed starting trays or containers of soil and they will continue to grow until it’s time to plant them outside.  It's a good idea to get your sweet potato slips started 6-8 weeks before your last frost date, or even earlier.  The longer your vines, the more plants you'll have.  
• When started early enough, the slips will grow into plants with long robust stems and many leaves.  This will be to your advantage, because you can cut up the stems and plant sections of it in the ground and each section will turn into it’s own plant.  

Planting Sweet Potatoes In The Garden

• Gently place each slip into a hole in the ground that is deep enough to cover the roots and the stem up to the base of the leaves.  If you started your own slips and planted them in trays of soil, you will plant them with the soil intact like you would any other plant.  For really long vines that grew in your trays of soil, you can cut chunks of the vine with 5 leaves per chunk.  Plant three leaves down into the soil, leaving the top two leaves above ground;  The leaves in the soil will turn into roots.  This is a great way to get a lot of plants from just a few slips.  

Watering And Weed

• Give your plants about 1 inch of water per week, and pull any weeds that come up through the holes in the landscape fabric. Otherwise, just leave them be until fall.

Harvesting Sweet Potatoes

• It’s important to harvest before frost in the fall, but I usually do a test dig about 100 days after I planted the sweet potatoes to see if they’re ready.  If the potatoes are nice sized, go ahead and dig them.  But if not, I let them grow until closer to frost.  If you let them grow too long they can get misshapen with cracks in them, and then they don’t store as well.  
• Before harvesting all of the sweet potatoes, I pull the vines off the top and put them into the compost pile.  Then I pull up the fabric.  I use a garden fork and gently dig up the potatoes.  We gather the potatoes into buckets or tubs and then prepare to cure them.

Curing Sweet Potatoes

• In order for your sweet potatoes to store for up to a year, it’s important to cure them.  To cure your sweet potatoes, lay them out in a high humidity high temperature environment for up to two weeks.  This will thicken the skin on the potatoes and increase their sugar content so they will store well.  It’s best if the environment is 90% humidiy and 90 degrees.  That can be hard for me to do living in a northern climate, so I often just lay my potatoes out in the warmest place I can find, and let them cure that way.  That’s another reason for harvesting earlier if your potatoes are big enough, because your outdoor temperatures will be warmer.  
• You can put your potatoes in buckets in a small room like a bathroom with a heater, and some water.  This will make a more ideal environment for curing your potatoes.  

Storing Sweet Potatoes

• Sweet potatoes are easy to store, and they prefer to be stored at room temperature.  They can easily be stored in a box under your bed or anywhere in your house and should keep for a year if cured properly.  Remember to save a few for starting more slips for next year.  You can also pressure can them if you prefer.  Just put chunks of sweet potatoes into jars, cover with hot water, and can at 10 lbs pressure for 90 minutes.