These colorful roots are easy to grow in home gardens. Learn the answer to “how do sweet potatoes grow” and more, including about the beauregard sweet potato.
Sweet potatoes are one of my favorite crops to grow. This healthful food contains high amounts of beta-carotene, an antioxidant that may help reduce your risk of developing some types of cancer. According to the Mayo Clinic, sweet potatoes also contain high amounts of potassium and vitamins A, B6, and C, and they’re a great source of fiber.
If you’ve only eaten sweet potatoes from the store or from a can, you’re missing out! Homegrown sweet potatoes are much better – crisp, delicious, and amazingly sweet. You can use them in place of less-healthful white potatoes for frying and mashing. You can also bake them into pies, casseroles, and more.
How Do Sweet Potatoes Grow: The Deets on Sweets
Unlike white potatoes, which are tubers in the nightshade family, Ipomoea batatas are roots (not tubers) from the morning glory family. The blooms on sweet potato vines will open with the dawn, like regular morning glories, and then close during the day. Because they’re a vining plant, most cultivars produce roots wherever they touch the ground. For this reason, sweet potatoes tend to produce a large harvest when they’re grown in loose soil where they can spread and root freely.
Sweet potatoes love hot weather, so check your growing season. Most cultivars require 90 to 120, or even 150, days to mature. If your area doesn’t offer at least three months, and preferably five months, of warm days, you’ll need to research row covers, high tunnels, and other season-extension techniques. Also, choose cultivars that do well in cold climates. The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association found that ‘Beauregard,’ ‘Georgia Jet,’ and ‘Covington’ did well in that state.
Sweet potatoes are grown from slips, not seeds. You can buy slips via mail order or at local garden stores, or you can produce your own by simply allowing sweet potatoes from the previous year’s crop to sprout. We count backward 6 to 8 weeks from when we want to plant the slips (about 2 weeks after the last frost (late May or early June in our area), and then we lightly bury the roots in a couple of inches of rich dirt in a raised bed. We keep the soil moist and cover the bed with a window or cold frame. The roots take several weeks to sprout, so don’t get discouraged! On average, one sweet potato will produce 10 to 20 slips for us (although 3 to 5 slips is more common for many gardeners). Small roots sprout best and are easiest to handle. If you want to plant 100 slips in your garden, use at least 20 small roots to produce them.
After the slips get more than 6 inches long, cut them off the sweet potato. You can plant the slips whether or not they have roots, although we prefer to place rootless slips into a cup of water for a week to grow roots.
We’ve grown sweet potatoes in multiple ways, including in raised beds, in tubs with trellising, and in raised rows in the garden. Raised beds and tubs have the advantage of being easier to weed, but ours didn’t produce as heavily, and we had problems with voles.
Whatever technique you choose, plant your slips 12 inches apart in warm, loose, well-drained soil. When we’re planting in raised rows, we space the rows 4 feet apart. We dig a small, shallow furrow, lay in the slips, cover with dirt, and water them well. If the weather is hot at planting time, we’ve found the slips benefit from shade while they acclimate to being transplanted. So, we provide shade by cutting small leafy tree limbs and sticking one into the ground beside each slip.
Sweet potatoes tend to grow fairly trouble-free. Our biggest struggle has been weeding after the vines grow long and thick. To make weeding easier, you can grow them on trellises; however, this has reduced yields for us. We feed sweet potatoes in our raised beds and tubs with fish and seaweed emulsion and a natural fertilizer every couple of weeks. For the row plants, we use a time-release fertilizer. You may also use a low-nitrogen, high-phosphorus fertilizer; bone meal; and kelp. Too much nitrogen will boost leaf production, but the plants won’t put as much energy into root growth.
Sweet potatoes grow lush on our property, with minimal pest pressure. If you’re troubled by insects, such as whiteflies, slugs, and flea beetles, try using row covers. Rabbits, deer, mice, and voles can do lots of damage; you can try electric fencing to repel rabbits and deer, and humane traps for mice and voles.
We water our sweets twice a week when it doesn’t rain – drip irrigation boosts growth on our raised rows – and mulch between rows to discourage weeds. Sweet potato plants will ramble everywhere, and you’ll often find yourself turning the vines back into the garden. You can also trim the ends and prepare them for eating as you would any greens.
Harvesting and Curing
The sweet potatoes we plant in late May or early June are ready to be harvested in late September or early October.
Harvest sweet potato roots after the plants’ leaves begin turning yellow, but before your first frost. My favorite harvesting method is to use a middle buster implement hitched to a tractor, but, of course, this isn’t practicable for smaller gardens. You can also dig by hand using a potato fork or a broadfork. If possible, wait to dig until after a light watering or rain – not a soaking one.
Brush the dirt off the newly dug roots but don’t wash them. Then, cure the roots in a warm, humid place for 7 to 10 days to allow any cuts to heal and to improve the flavor as the starches convert into sugars. Some gardeners place roots in a single layer in plastic bags with slits cut for aeration, while others use coolers to cure their harvests. A greenhouse will also work, but be sure to keep it humid by watering the floor occasionally. Ideal curing conditions are 90 percent humidity and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Before storing the cured roots, remove damaged roots and eat or preserve them immediately.
Remember to keep sweet potatoes in a cool, dry place and periodically check them to make sure they aren’t spoiling. We store ours in the crawl space under our house inside vented wooden crates we built ourselves. The roots will keep for about a year.
The Beauregard Sweet Potato and MoreTasty Taters to Try
You can choose from many different cultivars and colors of sweet potatoes, with enough flavor variations to suit almost anyone.
The United States Sweet Potato Council organizes cultivars into five basic types: “Orange skin with orange flesh, red skin with orange flesh, yellow skin with white flesh, purple skin with white flesh, and purple skin with purple flesh.” Here are three different colors of sweet potatoes to grow in your own garden.
‘Beauregard’ has wonderfully orange skin and flesh. This is the cultivar we grow. They store extremely well; ours keep for over a year in our crawl space. Widely available, ‘Beauregard’ is known for its productivity, crack resistance, and hardiness. I believe this early cultivar is perfect for beginning gardeners of sweet potatoes. To buy slips for your plot, visit Rare Seeds.
‘All Purple,’ like the name indicates, has rich purple skin and flesh. A traditional Japanese cultivar, ‘All Purple’ requires 120 days to mature. Luckily, it grows quickly and produces bountifully, and its roots store well. You can find slips online at the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.
‘Batas’ has white skin and white flesh, produces heavy yields, and is full of flavor. Certified Organic slips of this rare heirloom cultivar are being grown and preserved in small quantities by the Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa. The vines on this midseason sweet potato are known to be robust and spreading.
Growing slips from the same homegrown cultivar year after year may allow it to adapt to your specific climate. One of my favorite things about the sweet potato is that it’s self-perpetuating and a great way to promote resilience on your homestead!
Jenny Underwood is a home-schooling mama of four lively blessings. She lives on a fifth-generation property in the Missouri Ozarks. Follow her at Our Inconvenient Family.
