A Sweet Potato Primer

The soil has now warmed up enough and it’s time to plant sweet potatoes, but wait, don’t they only grow down south? Maybe you mean the pretty foliage plant that is used in planters that in one season can grow up and flow out of a container trailing up to 6 feet?

Lets talk about both plants for they each have their place in my garden. In the veggie garden we are talking about a plant that has been bred over the last century to have high sugar in relation to starch and to be a very tasty and nutritious vegetable. We receive into Morrison’s bundles of 25 8″ stems with a few leaves that don’t look like they could ever make it. From this rather humble start, in 90 to 100 days, springs a very dense vegetative cover that chokes out all the weed and produces a great crop of tasty sweet potatoes that can be either cooked fresh or stored through a good part of the winter.

I till up a bed 25 feet long, raking in 10-10-10 (fertilizer consisting of 10% nitrogen, 10% phosphate and 10% potash) to the soil. I try to have the ph above 6.6 and they absolutely need full sun. If your soil is heavy, it’s best to rake it into a mound to plant into for that makes harvesting the crop easier. I set each stem fully into the soft earth leaving a few wilted leaves out and keep watered.

Come the end of August I will start to dig into the row to steal some fresh sweet potatoes to be sliced up and sprayed with olive oil to go on the grill. The main part of the crop I wait for the first frost to kill the top growth and then I go digging. The two varieties we carry at the store are Georgia Jets which grow extremely fast and will yield sizable potatoes in 90 days.

The Georgia Jets have a red to purple outside color with a deep orange inside. The plants are vigorous so leave 4 feet between the rows. The other variety we carry is Bunch Porto Ricos for more limited spaces. This has a copper colored skin with a light red interior. This variety needs approx. 110 days for maturity.

For a dramatic companion plant to accent your flowers nothing beats a sweet potato vine (Ipomea batatas). The plant breeders have been working overtime with this plant. A few years back, all that was available was Margarita, Blackie and Tricolor. Margarita, with its bright chartreuse green heart shaped foliage is my favorite and most vigorous.

Blackie is a little less vigorous with a bird’s foot shaped leaf being almost black in color. Tricolor is dramatically less vigorous with both green, white and pink coloration in the leaf.

New to the market is the Illusion series with a more mounding habit and the Sweet Caroline series with an even more compact habit of spreading 18″ to 24″. The Sweet Caroline series has a number of different leaf colors and combinations. We have even seen some of these newer hybrids flower for us near the end of the summer but their true benefit is a contrasting dramatic foliage.