Putting in our 2016 Sweet Potato Crop (3 Different Methods)

We harvest sweet potatoes each fall and to be honest, they are the easiest crop we grow.  Why? Because we never plant them.  They come up in the garden each year on their own.  We dig them up when they are ripe and eat them and the cows eat the vines.  It is a win-win situation for all involved.

Here is one of the sweet potato plants that came up again this year.  I was trying to think of how many consecutive years they've come up and it has been so long, I just can't put a number to it.  Safely, I'd estimate 9 years, perhaps?  Pretty neat, I tell you!  The sweet potato leaves shown below have some bug damage, but they'll be alright.  This variety (probably a Beauregard) will vine out and re-root and spread all over the garden making sweet potato tubers all throughout the garden.

Volunteer Sweet Potatoes

So that was method #1.  For method #2, see below.  In the pot that contains our (Tricia & I) 25th Anniversary Alamo oak seedling, Russ also has something else sweet growing in there.  He pulled some slips off of some sweet potato varieties from some of the LSU Sweet Potatoes he brought home. They rooted quickly and I'll plant those in the garden as well.

LSU Sweet Potatoes

And here is method #3:  In This Post we mentioned that we had received some heirloom sweet potatoes from Tennessee.  I think they are called "Golden Wonder." They taste like they have honey and cinnamon in them, but none of that was added. It is just natural.  Well, in that post, we planted the 3 sweet potatoes.  One rotted, but two grew and really flourished!  Notice the different leaves. While the Beauregard and LSU sweet potatoes have heart-shaped leaves, the leaves on the heirloom has and odd-shape.

Golden Wonder Heirloom Sweet Potatoes

So in talking to Russ (my son who is a junior at LSU majoring in Horticulture), he educated me a little in growing sweet potatoes.  He told me that we can make MANY sweet potato plants off of these.  So, there are several ways to do this:  You can cut off portions of each growth coming up from the sweet potato and plant.  If you keep the soil moist, each section will root and become its own distinct plant.

Or you can simply pull up each growth coming out of the ground.  You won't get as many plants, but those plants will have roots and will likely all survive.  So that's what I did.  Take a look at the healthy root system on this Golden Wonder slip:

Sweet Potato root system

Then you simply put that plant in the ground like you would with any transplant and water it.

Out of the pot and into the garden (Golden Wonder)

I did the exact same thing with the slips from the LSU sweet potatoes that were growing with the live oak tree.

Out of the pot and into the garden (LSU sweet potato)

By the time I finished planting them, it was getting dark.  I watered them in good.

All Planted now

I'll add one other thing.  All of the Golden wonder slips came off of one of the two plants that we had growing in the pot.  I planted the second whole plant (with no slips separated) out near the muscadine trellis.  Sweet potatoes, if allowed to trellis (and not vine on the ground) will produce seeds.  These seeds can be harvested and used plant next year's crop.  I didn't even know that sweet potatoes produced seeds!

Russ will teach us how to do this.  You have to do something called scarifying the seed (by mechanized means or with sulfuric acid) in order to induce germination. Hopefully, we'll be able to get our own heirloom sweet potatoes to begin producing here.  Of course we'll keep you updated with yield.  Now we have 3 different varieties growing.