Sweet Potato
One of my wife’s favorite vegetable is the sweet potato. My kids love them, as well. My tastes are more geared towards…the chocolate chip cookie. Yet, I grow sweet potatoes, and have found that they are really quite easy to grow.
Sweet potatoes are loaded with lots of both Vitamin A and Vitamin E, as well as folic acid, and is a great source of minerals. In fact, in 1994, the Center for Science in the Public Interest ranked the Sweet Potato as the highest vegetable in terms of nutritional value. That is quite an honor for this tubular veggie.
Often confused, incorrectly, with the Yam which hail from Africa, the Sweet Potato takes its origin from Central America, where it has been grown for a few thousand years. Growing it here in Georgia is relatively simple. We have the temperature for it, a long hot summer.
To begin with sweet potatoes grow best in well drained soil, as their roots can suffer from excess water. They do best in temperatures that range between 75-85 degrees, though they can still grow in our hot summer days. If planted too early, they will suffer from cold days, as they do not enjoy the frosty weather.
After buying Sweet Potatoes from your favorite local farm, garden, and seed store, plant them in soil a bed of loose soil. This can be established by hand digging or tilling the ground in which you will plant the slips. Though Sweet Potatoes will grow in most soils, including heavy clay, you will benefit by adding composted material to your soil, or manure. Place slips one foot apart, and water well.
Sweet Potatoes will grow slowly at first, and will jump into high gear during mid summer. By the end of the summer, you will find an abundance of tangled Sweet Potato vines, so allow for plenty of room around the slips. Otherwise, you will quickly find that any plant nearby will become engulfed and swallowed up.
Sweet Potatoes are fairly resistant to disease, so no worries there. They will need to be watered with about an inch of water per week. As for weeds, simply weed the bed until the vines become a canopy over the bed, thus smothering any existing weeds.
The longer Sweet Potatoes stay in the ground, the larger vitamin content the potato will have, as well as a larger potato in general. So, don’t rush to take them out. I wait until at least four months have gone by, though they can be harvested in 100 days. My middle daughter and I harvest them in middle to late September. It is not a difficult task, we simply dig them up with a garden fork, or pitch fork, making sure not to dig too deep or too hard, otherwise, we might damage the potato.
If you haven’t planted Sweet Potato yet, or are a little reluctant to do so due to inexperience, well…this is a perfect time to do so. So, go buy some Sweet Potato slips, and plant some right now. Enjoy!