Turn ONE Sweet Potato Into 100 LBS Of Sweet Potatoes By Growing SWEET POTATO SLIPS! [Complete Guide]

what's going on gardeners it is tuesday april 13th and today i'm going to show all of you how to start your own sweet potato slips from store-bought potatoes from start to finish so you can grow your own sweet potatoes from whatever variety your heart desires for pennies on the dollar if you're new to the channel please consider subscribing and hitting the bell to receive new video notifications and check out our amazon storefront and spreadshop in the video description for a list of the gardening products i use and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated sweet potatoes are one of those things that every gardener should be growing in their backyard and that's because of how incredibly versatile they are and how easy to grow they are sweet potatoes love hot humid weather they love deluge rain they're virtually impervious to diseases they have almost no pests and they can store for months at a time so they're one of these super easy things to grow that practically grow themselves that you can store all winter long and they're a great source of food for you and your family and a great way to cut down on grocery bills now contrary to popular belief sweet potatoes are not potatoes at all they're not related to potatoes they're actually the tuber from a morning glory vine they're part of the morning glory family and they grow from something called a slip and you simply stick those slips into the ground and they will root and then they will grow roots and those roots will turn into the tubers that you eat while you can go to the grocery store and buy the good old orange sweet potatoes we all know and love i recommend you go to a local asian market if you have one and buy some of the varieties there because in my opinion they blow away the orange sweet potato one of my favorites is the murasaki sweet potato it is a purple uh skin sweet potato with white flesh it's one of my favorites and you can actually see this one is starting to sprout and this sprout right here is what will become the slip that you will plant in the garden but my absolute favorite sweet potato in the whole wide world is the okinawan sweet potato the japanese okinawan sweet potato it has a white tan outer skin but the inside is purple like crayola crayon purple it is absolutely delicious it is one of the sweetest sweet potatoes you'll ever have now the thing about these sweet potatoes are they're generally very expensive especially the okinawan sweet potatoes this one potato costs something like a dollar fifty two dollars just for this little guy they're usually three dollars a pound or more so i recommend you go to the asian grocery store and you just buy two or so because they will sprout and give you many slips that you can plant in the garden while you can order the slips online they are generally very expensive i see them for as much as 25 dollars for a dozen slips so that's a really high price for two to four dollars worth of potatoes you can start dozens of your own and i'm going to show you how to do that now but before i show you how we need to discuss timing and when you should start your sweet potato slips now sweet potatoes are frost tender they can't tolerate any frost however you can't simply plant your sweet potatoes out after your last frost date like you can a tomato plant or a pepper plant things like tomatoes and peppers while they're frost sensitive they can tolerate dips into the upper 30s low 40s sweet potatoes cannot they are purely tropical and they should not be planted outside until nights are consistently in the 50s or warmer so for many of us sweet potato plants should actually be planted about three to four weeks after your last frost date for me that's something around the last week of april the first week of may where i live on the southeastern coast of north carolina so you want to take your last frost date add about one month and then start your sweet potato slips about 60 to 90 days before then it takes about two to three months to get these ready now it's april 13th here where i live so i am way behind i should have started this process in mid to late february in order to get my sweet potato slips out on may 1st so i kind of made a mistake here however the good news is that sweet potatoes are a root of a vine so you can leave those sweet potatoes in the ground growing all the way until the vines get frosted so even when your frost start the frost will kill the vines but because the sweet potato tubers are insulated by the ground they will not be harmed so even if i wait until late may early june to get my sweet potato slips in the ground that will still give me five months of growing for those tubers to get nice and large so even if i'm way behind schedule it's not going to matter because i will have plenty of time for them to grow to start your sweet potato slips the most popular method that you'll find online is usually most people will stick toothpicks inside their sweet potatoes and they'll stick them halfway into a glass of water and let them root inside the glass of water and while this will work it generally takes a long period of time the superior method is to take a moisture retaining potting mix like you see right here this is simply a compressed cube of hp pro mix that i moistened to the point where it is adequately moist but it's not wet when i squeeze it it holds its shape kind of like a snowball but when i squeeze it no water drips out so that's exactly what we want here now all you have to do is you have to take your sweet potatoes and you simply lay them in this mix and kind of bury them about halfway into this moist potting mix and these sweet potatoes will root for you like this and they will develop these slips all over the place so we're going to place our sweet potatoes so they're half buried and this container right here is just an eight dollar plastic sterilite container from walmart then what i'm going to do is i'm going to place this lid on here but leave it a little bit cracked because i want it to build humidity because sweet potatoes love warmth and humidity but we need to let fresh air in daily so what i'm going to do is i'm in my sun room right now this box is going to sit in a sunny location that gets at least six hours of sun every single day and the sun is going to heat it up and it is going to spur budding on all of these individual sweet potatoes and that is going to turn into the slips that we can cut off and root later and once we get the splits going i'll show you how to do that here we are on may 5th and i'm so excited to show you how many slips have developed on my sweet potatoes already just look at the roots that are being put down into this potting mix this is absolutely incredible and you can just see how many slips i have going as a result and one thing i want to show you is that i have this right in front of an open window in my sunroom you will notice that the window is completely up and it's like that so i can acclimate the sweet potato slips to the sun remember your windows will naturally block most of the uv radiation from the sun so you can't acclimate anything in front of a window you have to have the window open to let the full spectrum sunlight in and that's what i've done here and this right here is proof that this method of rooting sweet potatoes and growing slips is vastly superior to the rooting method that people do inside a glass of water the real way to do this is with potting mix now one thing that you will notice is that all of these sweet potato slips are coming out of this one very large potato in the back and it's like that for a reason the reason why is because this potato in the back is a murasaki sweet potato that i grew last year and stored in november so this sweet potato is six months old and that's why it is rooting so readily these other sweet potatoes i purchased from a grocery store so they are much fresher therefore it's going to take them more time to root because this sweet potato was old it was ready to go however i will have you notice that i am starting to get some rooting on my other sweet potatoes and you can see this one right here is starting to get a little bit of green growth and it is beginning to root and give slips but that being said now i am going to show you exactly how to take these sweet potato slips and prepare them for planting i want you to notice exactly how sweet potatoes root sweet potatoes are the root of a morning glory vine and they root along the vine so what you see right here are actually root nodes so when you plant them they will grow and attach into the ground and they will become full roots you can see all of the roots at the bottom of the sweet potato right there all of those right there are roots and when you plant them into the ground they will continue to grow and they will produce more sweet potatoes along those routes so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start removing the sweet potato slips and then as i remove them i'm going to place them into this fresh pint glass full of clean fresh water because i want to preserve the roots so i'm simply going to start cutting them off and each of these sweet potato slips can actually be broken down into more individual slips because they all have little root nodes on them so they are going to be placed inside that pint glass because i do not want those roots to dry out when it comes to actually separating your individual sweet potato slips what you need to know is that each of these nodes which is basically where one of where a branch comes out of the main stem and you see roots each one of them can be separated as a new sweet potato slip so here you can see there are two nodes there are roots here and there are roots here this is actually one sweet potato slip so we can actually separate that because it has its own root structure so same thing here this is another slip and then this is another slip and this is another slip and you can separate them over and over and over again and get plenty of individual slips to plant so you can see how many slips we just got off of that one vine and each of them can be used to start their own new sweet potato plant after the sweet potato slips have been harvested what most people tell you to do at this point is take the sweet potato slips and stick them in a glass of water for about a week or two to continue to develop the roots i'm here to tell you that that is not actually necessary in fact last year i had sweet potato slips shipped to me from etsy that were just cuttings that had no roots at all and i stuck them right into the ground i watered them every single day for about for about a week to keep them moist and every single one of them rooted in about one to two weeks i had no losses at all so you do not have to do the step where you wait an additional week or two for them to root in a glass of water you can plant them directly and save time and that's what i'm going to do with these i took my best most well rooted cuttings and i'm going to stick them directly into the ground and now is the perfect time to do this it's 6 p.m at night the the harshness of the sun is gone it's overcast and there's a chance of a rain shower so this is exactly when you want to plant your sweet potato slips don't plant them in the morning or the middle of the afternoon because the harsh rays of the sun will be too much for them it's very important that you put them in in the evening when the sun has passed so they have all night to acclimate and you have to keep them wet while they root now each one of these sweet potato slips will be planted one foot apart from each other so each sweet potato slip will have a full one square foot to grow in and they are going to go directly in these planting holes that i have amended with an organic 555 slow release fertilizer as well as a light dusting of bone meal to help aid in the root development so i'm simply going to take the slips and i'm going to place them directly into the planting hole making sure that where the root nodes are that they are completely buried and i'm going to compact them all into the ground just like that and it really is just that simple to plant your sweet potato slips now that they all have been planted we are going to water them in really well because it is critically important that we keep our sweet potato slips constantly moist for the first week or two until they get completely established and just on cue it looks like we're going to get a little rainstorm to help aid in establishing these sweet potato slips and we will check back in one to two weeks once the sweet potato vines show signs of establishing here we are on may 12th you can see how far the sweet potato slips have come along in such a short period of time this slip right here is actually putting out new leaves this one is starting to put out a new leaf here it's established these are all established as well as you can tell by the way they're standing upright this one's putting on new leaves this one's developing new leaves these are new leaves that are starting to develop you can see them forming in between the nodes of the sweet potato slip this one's upright and established this one's upright and established so it looks like that we have 100 transplant success they all look great and now that they've established we will expect them to come to life even more quickly as temperatures warm and as a fun little experiment while those sweet potato slips were establishing in ground in my raised garden bed i also took some excess slips and i placed them in this cup right here right by the light of my sunroom window and they've been sitting here for the same amount of time and you can see the amount of root development that has formed on the sweet potato slips they're looking pretty good so if you don't want to go the direct planting method you can get pretty good root development in about one to two weeks if you cut the slips off and place them in water again i like the direct planting method better because i think it saves a step but if you don't want to go that way you can go this way as well and get good results in a short amount of time just keep in mind that if you do want to root them in a cup of water you will have to change the water every two to three days if you let the water get murky the cuttings could fail and rot and amazingly enough look how many new slips i now have on my sweet potato all over again i picked most of them off and now i have dozens once again and to make matters even more awesome this sweet potato right here has started to sprout slips as well so i'll get even more off of that sweet potato and this one down here is still firm as a rock so it should probably produce another 50 to 100 individual sweet potato slips so there you have it you can get many dozens of sweet potato slips off of one single potato one single potato could literally produce enough sweet potato slips for dozens of pounds of individual sweet potatoes and that is just amazing as for the other sweet potatoes they are also fresh from the market that they obviously will need a little bit more time to sprout slips but i'm in no rush we have long summers here and i can't wait to get some of the okinawan slips they are my favorite sweet potato i don't know about you but i am blown away by how many individual sweet potato slips that one large sweet potato has produced i'm going to get literally dozens upon dozens of slips off of that one large sweet potato and if you factor in that each individual slip will probably give you a couple of pounds of sweet potatoes it is not inconceivable for that one sweet potato to deliver me something like 50 to 100 pounds of sweet potatoes if i were to religiously collect all of those individual slips and root them of course i don't have enough room in my garden to do that but if you have a very large garden it is not inconceivable for one sweet potato to give you an entire rose worth of slips and multiply into an entire rose worth of sweet potato plants that is how productive they are and how great they are at multiplying and that right there is how you can turn one sweet potato into dozens of sweet potato slips or dozens if not a hundred pounds of sweet potatoes they are that productive and it is easy to do and i hope that you got a lot out of this video and learned a lot along the way if you did find this video helpful please make sure to hit the like button subscribe to the channel and ring that notification bell so you're notified when we produce and upload more videos like these if you're curious about any of the products that i use in my garden they are all linked down below in my amazon storefront link down in the video description and while you're there check out my spreadshop link for custom merch if you want to support the channel thank you all again so much for watching and i hope to see all of you again on the next video oh the most handsomest boy in the whole wide world is all ready for bed for the night we'll just have to take him outside one more time to go potty you want to go outside and go potty no no he's all done for the night he already went the only thing he has to worry about is catching some z's right mr handsome show everybody how handsome you are

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 2,637,527

Keywords: sweet potato slips, growing sweet potato slips, start sweet potato slips, starting sweet potato slips, sweet potatoes, sweet potato, sweet potato vines, growing sweet potatoes, sweet, potato, slips, how to grow sweet potatoes, growing fruit trees, fruit trees, growing, garden, gardening, gardening tips, garden tips, gardening tips and tricks, food forest, edible landscaping, raised bed, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, organic gardening, how to, diy, millennial gardener

Id: 0igp5IzO21g

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022