Over the summer, when few things grow here in Lehigh Acres, sweet potatoes grow super crazy. Consider starting some next spring and you will have plenty of sweet potatoes to share in the fall. Here are a few terms that will make sweet potato growing extra easy:
Tubers are the sweet potato bought in the grocery store. They grow under the ground from sprawling sweet potato vines.
Slips grow from a sprouting sweet potato tuber. Slips can be purchased mail order or grown from a store-bought sweet potato tuber. Remember the school science experiment of cutting a sweet potato in half, placing half in water and half out of water, supported by toothpicks? That's exactly how it's done. Once the sweet potato has sprouted, the slips can be removed from the tuber and treated as cuttings.
Cuttings can be made from mature sweet potatoes vines growing in the garden by clipping off 6-8 inches of the end of the vines. Place slips/cuttings in a glass of water to start rooting. The portion of the slip/cutting that will be under water should be stripped of its leaves to prevent it from rotting. When the roots are about an inch long the slips/cuttings can be planted in the ground. Keep them moist until they are established in your garden soil and our summer rains begin.
Harvest smaller tubers anytime after the vines start growing vigorously. The main harvest can begin when the vines start to die back in the fall. Gentle digging under the vines will reveal bountiful prizes.
Curing is the time is takes to "heal" the sweet potatoes for sweetness and to prepare the tubers for storage. Curing can take a couple of days to a couple of months. Two weeks worked just fine for this gardener. To cure, place newly harvested sweet potatoes on newspaper in a place out of the sun and allow them to dry. Space them apart so they don't touch and turn them occasionally so they air out on all sides.
Store sweet potatoes by wrapping each sweet potato in newspaper, place loosely in a ventilated container, and store in a cool place. A large cardboard box with holes cut on all sides for ventilation and no lid works well for storage. The sweet potatoes might sprout in early spring, but they taste just fine.
Share your excess sweet potato harvest with a local food pantry. Your gift will be greatly appreciated.
Lehigh Acres Edible Gardening Exchange members exchange knowledge, successes, failures, ideas, seeds, and more to grow edibles year-round in Lehigh Acres, Florida.
