How To Get The Most From Your Sweet Potato Plants

you should be growing sweet potatoes in your food garden and today I'm going to tell you why it's a great food source it's a dual purpose food source you know as the plant is growing you can harvest the greens and eat greens like a stir fry a lot of Asian dishes call for sweet potatoes as a stir fry and then at the end of the season you dig up these nice tubulars underneath the ground there that's full of all kinds of vitamins beta-carotenines and a real healthy Forest packed full of all kind of nutrients and they store well for several weeks after that so it is one of the best Dual Purpose food sources we can grow in our food Garden second reason is it feels a great slot in our garden where other things may not flourish as well an example a lot about kale and our brassicas and all have come to the end of their life cycle it's getting a little warm so I've chopped them up and I really don't have anything to fill that slot that's going to grow during the summertime and take all the heat sweet potatoes fills that slot right there they love the Heat and you can plant them behind things in Nebraska family they are in the Morning Glory family so they work with a great rotation there behind Nebraska's or maybe your sweet peas or any of your legumes these very few plants that flourish during our hot heat down here in the South okra is one that loves to heat and sweet potatoes do as well now things like tomatoes and peppers and watermelons and cantaloupes and melons and all those kind of things are really going to struggle during these hot summer days but these plants okra and sweet potatoes are going to love it now the question is how do you grow you cannot grow sweet potatoes from seed you have to have what we call slips slips are cutting off of the potatoes actually what you do is you cut the vine off and you end it with a slip now A friend of mine has a commercial sweet potato farm and I went down there yesterday and I got some slips from him he had planted sweet potatoes I told him what the actual potatoes in these rows about two to three foot wide and covered them and they sprouted and come up and he has this machine to go in there and cut the vine we call that slips so if you've got sweet potatoes left over from last year you can grow your own slips by simply putting sweet potatoes in the ground letting them Sprout come up cut the slips or you can buy sweet potato slips already which is probably the easiest for most people now sweet potato slips when you plant these are going to root out at the nodes you see what I'm talking about right here the node that's where the roots are going to come out at now this one right here if I wanted to I could actually cut in a couple different places to get two to three slips off this one plant I just need a leaf coming up to plant out of the ground there but I'm going to plant this whole thing because I got plenty of them now you could simply lay it in the ground sideways like this right here and cover all those nodes up or you could plant it like you would a regular plant just stick it down in the dirt if you do that you got to make sure you get at least a couple of these nodes into the soil so these roots are Sprout out okay so we're planting sweet potatoes in the middle of the summer time for the growing season Syria it is very important that you use drip tape there because it's probably going to be a dry summer and we need to keep those plants watered and drip takes the ideal way these plants really get big and it's going to be hard to do overhead irrigation to get that moisture down in there because of the canopy of the sweet potatoes so drip tape is important another reason we want to use shrimp tape is for fertilization when these plants get big it's going to be really hard to get the fertilizer down next to the row where we want it to be so injecting that fertilizer into that drip tapes will be a lifesaver there if we're not using drip tape I would want to ban my fertilizer next to the line of potatoes I had before they started running on plant space we want to do 12 inches in row spacing and I plant on every emitter as you see right here 12 inches seems to be the magic number there and on row space and rows apart 48 inches seems to be perfect also now I did something a little unique this year because I had these zinnias I needed to plant so I come over 48 inches in planted mirror zinnias this is somewhat some would say maybe some companion planting my xeniors will be gone by the time these potatoes run all the way over here and they'll have room to continue to grow there so I'm going to give my potatoes plenty of room to grow and then I'm going to have some zinnias to harvest before they get too big now sweet potatoes are a little forgiving on the pH the ideal pH for sweet potatoes is going to be 6.0 but if you got anywhere from 5.5 to 6.5 hey I think you're going to be okay now as far as in p and K goes they're really not considered heavy heavy feeders they like about two pounds up in per thousand square feet over the growing season so not not no real heavy feeders like a tomato or anything like that but they do like potassium so if you've got a plot that is high potassium it's an ideal candidate for growing sweet potatoes to form some of that potassium off of uh they like a little phosphorus not a lot but if you don't know what your nutrient load in your soil is I would recommend using the balance fertilizer such as a 20 20. now days to material most varieties anywhere from 90 to 110 days and I want to talk about the three most popular varieties they are several different varieties out there these purple ones and I've got a few purple ones planted but the three most popular varieties that I think are beer guard Beauregard excuse me Covington and Georgia chip Beauregard is one of the newer varieties and for the home Garden it is the most forgiving and easiest one to grow so if you're a first time sweet potato grower my regard may be the one for you Georgia Jets is the older variety that probably has the high sugar content it probably has the most flavor to them they don't grow the prettiest potato but they grow a good eating potato now Covington is one that I'm ruined it's probably my favorite variety and it is resistant to root not nematode and it is a newer variety and it's easy to grow not as easy to be regard and it has good sugar content maybe not as good as Georges yet but it kind of is the best in the middle there and it makes a nice uniform potato a lot of you Market farmers in your commercial Farmers they love this variety because it grades out well and makes a good potato and I like that too and plus it is good to eat so Covington is my choice to eat however don't disregard the Beauregard I've grown it before I Like It the Georgia Jets I like them as well but just my favorite variety happens to be the Covenant so let's talk about when and how to harvest after about a hundred days of bathing those plants along you're going to notice the vines starting to die out just a little bit and it's going to be time for you to think about harvesting those sweet potatoes so you want to go out there and use your digging fork and you want to harvest them pretty much the same way you do Irish potatoes dig them up but you don't want to wash them and you don't want to eat them as you dig them up you've got to let these things cure out a few days that carbs has got to convert to sugars so as you dig them you want to put them in a spot that's pretty warm and it normally is that time of year when I harvest my sweet potatoes 85 90 degrees and we normally have high humidity so I'll just put them somewhere that's maybe out of direct sun and let them cure from anywhere from seven to ten days at that point you can start consuming them you can start eating those those carbs have converted to sugars don't wash them because if you wash them you're going to introduce bad bacteria and they're going to spoil on you they're going to store so much better if you don't wash them then I will store them just like I do my ice potatoes and onions and things like that I just put them underneath my barn where I got good circulation there and they'll store for a few weeks and we eat them up pretty well everybody loves good sweet potatoes sweet potato fries is all the Rave now I personally love them baked with some cinnamon butter on them but everybody's got their favorite way to consume sweet potatoes it's a great food source for your food Garden to extend into the fall and winter and give you some good eating [Music] foreign

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Keywords: hosstools, growyourownfood, vegetable garden, sustainable living, homestead, gardening tools, vegetablegardenseeds, seed companies, beginner gardener, beginner garden, gardening tips, guide to planting, best seed varieties, gardening supplies, simple gardening tips, raisedbedgardening, getdirty, hoss tools, gardening, Gardening tips and tricks, Homesteading, Home garden tips, Garden success tips, Grow your own food, Hoss tools seeds, Growing vegetables, How to grow vegetables

Id: cWvFfH6nURM

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023