The humble sweet potato. A 100 calorie root that tastes more like candy than a potato. Not to be confused with the Yam, a similar looking, but drier vegetable grown mainly in Africa and Asia, the sweet potato gives you a lot of bang for those 100 calories. They're high in vitamin A, vitamin B5, B6, thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, and, carotenoids which means they can help fight cancer. But don't go eating bowls and bowls of sweet potatoes on the off chance you think they'll cure your cancer. They won't. Plus eating too many of them will turn your skin and nails orange because of all the Vitamin A, so then you won't only have cancer, you'll have cancer and look like you're wearing a prison jumpsuit.
For the past 6 years I've been growing sweet potatoes in a place you really shouldn't be able to grow sweet potatoes; cold, cold, Canada. And yet. Every single year I've successfully grown sweet potatoes. I've also successfully grown what appears to be cellulite on my foot which you shouldn't be able to do either.
But there you have it. A success on both counts.
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My 4' x 4' sweet potato patch was all the space I needed for planting 9 sweet potato slips.
I don't need much more sweet potatoes than this patch will produce, plus I didn't want to waste too much space in my garden on sweet potatoes since last year my harvest was mostly enjoyed by mice and voles. Who neither made reservations nor left me a tip.
This year I tried some vole protection. I covered my entire sweet potato bed with hardware cloth screwed into the raised beds so tight that not a single vole could squish through it at any point. Or so I hoped.
On October 3rd I trudged up to the garden while the paint in my dining room was drying and took the hardware cloth off and got my very first look at whether or not this experiment worked.
That plastic is thermal plastic (in case you missed it in the video) which helps keep the temperature of the soil raised by 10 degrees. That's the trick to growing big sweet potatoes in Canada.
If you aren't sure what to do with sweet potatoes, my favourite way to eat them is either baked, just like a regular potato or made into sweet potato fries using my Guaranteed Crispy Sweet Potato Fry technique.
By the way, shitload is a technical term you understand.
Hi I used your tip for growing sweet potatoes, that is where you put them in soil. I put some soil in a long and narrow growing container (came with my Garland growlight system) and put that on a heat mat. It took quite awhile before I saw any leaves and nice long sprouts but they came, finally, and they are fabulous. Thanks so much for this great post. I will plant them in some huge pots in my greenhouse so no voles or mice to disturb them and lots of heat.
Planting in pots is great for sweet potatoes. :) Don't crowd them, they're weirdly adept at knowing how many neighbours they have and they'll revolt if they sense another sweet potato is too close. Glad it worked! My own sweet potatoes are incredibly slow with forming slips this year. :/ ~ karen!
Karen, did you make holes in the hardware cloth for the plants to grow through? I can't tell from the pictures.
That is an amazing harvest! I'm definitely going to try growing sweet potatoes next year.
Crop looks great! I am in SW Ontario, just ouside of town is a massive sweet potato farm. Not as fun as growing your own, but nice that a 2 minute drive you can get sweet potatoes year round. Question, is a vole the same thing as a mole? I have never heard of a vole. Awsome blog. Enjoy everyone you write.
Um. I have no idea, lol. A vole looks like a field mouse. Which got me to wondering ... what *is* the difference. So I looked it up. :) http://www.mvtrapper.com/organic-mole-and-vole-treatment.html ~ karen!
It's a cute ass. And congratulations on the unharmed harvest!
Holy Cow that is a crapton of sweet potatoes. Well done.
You can also eat the sweet potato vines...I learned this from the interwebs out of sheer desperation the first time I tried to grow them and then promptly took over most of my back yard (zone 7b)! They are an Asian staple. My vines rooted all over the place and I ended up having to dig up a section of patio in order to get the tubers that had decided to grow UNDER the patio stones....Luckily(?) the section needed to have the slope changed slightly anyway!
After seeing your harvest, I'm kinda sorry I tagged you in my Instagram post about my "very wee sweet potatoes" I was able to grow following your tutorial. They are the bonsai of sweet potatoes due to an early harvest ( due to the crappy weather here in Alberta). We had 6" of snow the day you harvested. Simply beautiful veggies you grew! I'll do it again next year.