seed sweet potatoes?

makitmama 10/14/2012, 11:16 am

I harvested the 10 sf I had planted with sweet potatoes today. Got about 45# total, which I think is pretty good for a zero effort garden.
I had lots of root masses that had small, pecan to egg sized potatoes. Can I save them as seeds for next year? if so, how? I don't like to buy slips and my house was too cold this year to sprout some.

littlejo 10/14/2012, 3:26 pm

I don't know if the small ones have enough to them to grow a slip. You said it was too cold to grow slips? The 'baby, small' are not just planted. Slips are planted and not the potato so that if there is a disease in/on the potato, it won't be planted, just the new slips.
To grow slips, even in the cold, get a large container, maybe a 5 gal. bucket, with holes in it for drainage. Fill with damp peat moss. Use maybe some rolled up fence wire, to be about 2.5 ft above the bucket. plant the potatoes for slips, around the fence wire. Take plastic, clear preferred, completely cover the wire pole and the whole bucket. Tie down at bottom with maybe some twine. Set in yard, try to protect from wind, but set where it gets sun all day long. It will get hot during the day but, some good slips should grow. Be sure the peat moss stays damp. Do this about 3 weeks before time to plant slips in the ground.
Jo

plantoid 10/14/2012, 4:41 pm

littlejo wrote:I don't know if the small ones have enough to them to grow a slip. You said it was too cold to grow slips? The 'baby, small' are not just planted. Slips are planted and not the potato so that if there is a disease in/on the potato, it won't be planted, just the new slips.
To grow slips, even in the cold, get a large container, maybe a 5 gal. bucket, with holes in it for drainage. Fill with damp peat moss. Use maybe some rolled up fence wire, to be about 2.5 ft above the bucket. plant the potatoes for slips, around the fence wire. Take plastic, clear preferred, completely cover the wire pole and the whole bucket. Tie down at bottom with maybe some twine. Set in yard, try to protect from wind, but set where it gets sun all day long. It will get hot during the day but, some good slips should grow. Be sure the peat moss stays damp. Do this about 3 weeks before time to plant slips in the ground.
Jo

Thanks for that little Jo ,
Do you know if you can store the tubers for four months or so in a cold place indoors such as in neat vermiculite a few degrees above freezing and then move to the sprouting for slips stage around the end of March next year ?

I ask ... for at present here in the UK the big supermarkets are selling sweet potatoes and as I quite like them I'd love to have a bash at growing them in mother natures own soil .

littlejo 10/14/2012, 5:19 pm

They should keep well, as long as they don't freeze. I kept mine under a tarp on the porch, but we only got a few nights of freezing weather all winter. How about just under the bed. Of course you prob. don't run any heat at all. I'm a wimp and must have some heat during the winter months.
Jo

plantoid 10/14/2012, 8:29 pm

cheers Jo
I'm a super whimp and have heat whenever I need it ( I'm diabetic and suffer with temp control probs 0 i'm either glowing like the back brake light on a motorbikeoir shivvering like a mackerel that just been caught .

It looks like we will be buying a pound or so of tuberes when we next go shopping & I'll store them in some vermiculite out in the shed or our caravan which has an anti condensation heater fitted and running where it stays a few degrees above freezing .

littlejo 10/14/2012, 10:36 pm

The hardest part of this is to prevent yourself from eating them before spring!
Jo

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