Sweet potatoes are a warm-weather crop. They require a long, hot growing season. • Sweet potatoes are grown from rooted cuttings, called “slips” or “draws”. Slips are best started indoors from sweet potato tubers. Slips stated indoors take about 12 weeks to reach transplant size. • Transplant sweet potato slips into the garden after all…
Sweet Potato
How to Harvest and Store Sweet Potatoes
Harvest sweet potatoes as soon as they are big enough to eat—usually when the ends of the vines begin to turn yellow. Most sweet potato varieties are ready to harvest 95 to 120 days after transplanting. But smaller tubers—called “baby bakers”—can be lifted sooner if they are big enough to eat. Lift a few tubers…
Sweet Potato Pancakes
Serve sweet potato pancakes with bacon and eggs at breakfast or as a side dish with chicken or ham at supper time. These pancakes aren’t too far a cry from sweet potato pie but just enough. And they aren’t the boiled and mashed sweet potatoes you serve alongside turkey and mashed potatoes. Maple syrup or…
Sweet Potato Growing Problems: Troubleshooting
Sweet potatoes require loose, well-drained soil and about 100 very warm days. Sweet potatoes are usually grown from slips started from roots (to start your own add another 40 days). Set sweet potato starts into the garden about the same time you set out tomato transplants in spring. For sweet potato growing tips see Sweet Potato…
Sweet Potatoes: Short-Summer Varieties
Sweet potatoes in 100 days! Sweet potatoes started from slips–rooted sprouts–purchased at the garden center or from a seed catalog can be harvested in about 100 days, even less. Short-season sweet potato varieties include ‘Beauregard’, ‘Centennial’, and ‘Georgia Jet.’ These three planted from slips will be ready for harvest in 80 to 90 days. Varieties…
How to Grow Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potatoes are a tender, warm-season perennial plant grown as an annual. • Set sweet potato starts or slips in the garden after all danger of frost has passed in spring, usually 4 weeks after the last average frost date. • Sweet potatoes grow best where the air temperature remains very warm, from 75° to…
Sweet Potato: Kitchen Basics
• A sweet potato is not a potato, and it is not a yam. • A sweet potato can be prepared in just about every way a potato can. • What most people in North America call a yam is really an orange-fleshed sweet potato. The three sentences above are the basics of sweet potatoes….