How to Grow Sweet Potato in Your Garden?sweet potato vegetable

Sweet potatoes will not grow from seed like most other vegetables, they must be cut. Cuttings are shoots grown from a mature sweet potato. You can order plants on the internet or from a local nursery (quite rare), but it is best to start cutting your plants from a sweet potato you bought at the store (preferably organic) or from your own garden if you have already started growing sweet potatoes. If you are buying from your grocery store, try to find out if your sweet potato is a creeping or climbing variety.

To start your cuttings, you need several healthy, clean sweet potatoes. Each sweet potato can produce up to 50 leaf cuttings. To create cuttings, wash your potatoes thoroughly and cut them in half or into large sections. Place each section in a jar or glass of water with half the potato under water and the other half on top. Use toothpicks to hold the potato in place.

Cuttings need warmth, so place them on a windowsill or radiator. Within a few weeks, your sweet potatoes will be covered with leafy shoots on top and roots on the bottom.

Root your sweet potato cuttings well:

Once your sweet potatoes have made leaves and small roots, you need to separate them into plantlets. To do this, take each cutting and carefully remove it from the sweet potato. Take each shoot and place it in a shallow container with the bottom half of the stem submerged in water and leaves over the bowl. Within a few days, several roots will appear at the bottom of each new plant. When the roots are about 3cm long, the new plantlets are ready to be planted. To keep your cuttings healthy, be sure to keep the water fresh and discard any beads that don’t produce roots or that appear to be dying or moldy.

Sweet Potato Leaves

Plant your cuttings:

Using a small hand trowel, dig a hole about 10cm deep and 7cm wide. Place a sweet potato plant in each hole with the roots facing down. Position the plant so that the bottom half is covered in soil and the top half with all the new leaves is above the soil.

Carefully fill the hole with soil so as not to damage the new plant. Sweet potatoes don’t like to be disturbed too much and are quite fragile. When you’ve covered it completely with soil, gently press down on the plant and surrounding soil to set the plant in place and remove any remaining air pockets. Continue in the same way until all your plants are in place.

Water often and continue to water as much as possible.

Once all of your sweet potato cuttings are in place, water them well. You’ll want to give them a thorough watering until all of the surrounding soil is moist. Stop watering before your mound starts to erode. New plants, such as cuttings, should be watered daily for the first week and every other day for the second week. Each week, the watering will be a little further apart before watering once a week at a minimum. If the soil is very dry or you have a lot of rain, you may need to establish this schedule in your own garden. Sweet potatoes can withstand drought, but will produce less, so be sure to water them during the hottest part of the summer.