It was my husband’s idea. I had never heard of anyone growing sweet potatoes in Idaho. To inspire me, he found videos about growing sweet potatoes for us to watch together in our home dinner theater (aka watching from the comfortable couches in the living room). The southern accents and plant life in the videos indicated a longer, warmed growing season was the norm for sweet potatoes. That does not describe the typical southwestern Idaho growing season.
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But I said I was willing to give it a try, so after a couple of weeks, he brought home two bags of fingerling sweet potatoes for me to plant. One bag had orange skinned sweet potatoes. The other had purple skinned sweet potatoes. Thinking I needed to give them a good start on the season, I started them in late winter. However, I will warn you now that once they begin growing, the plant becoming full and gangly. Here is how it began:
- I mixed up my basic potting soil mix, the same that I start my seeds (for more on evaluating seed starting soil, see my book: Growing a Garden From Seeds in Southwest Idaho)
- I found two medium sized, rather flat pots (you can see one in the video),
- put a layer of soil in the pot,
- placed the sweet potatoes in the pot with minimal space between them,
- then surrounded and covered them with soil to a depth of about one inch.
- I watered them in, then kept them moderately moist day by day. I had a sense that, unlike seeds, I didn’t want the soil to be saturated. That could likely result in rotting potatoes and mold.
Once there were green shoots poking up from the soil, I placed the pots under greenhouse lights, where they stayed until the weather was suitable for hardening them off. Around late April or early May, I planted them in the garden, as shown in my video below.
Note: I kept a close eye on nighttime low temperatures and covered the sweet potato plants (or slips) with milk carton greenhouses any evening prior to very cold temperatures. I did have one or two nights that were so cold that a few leaves suffered in spite of the covering, but the plants still survived.
I waited until early fall to even check for sweet potatoes under the soil. Actually, I waited so long that my husband went ahead and dug some up. Some of them were huge, bigger than softballs. Some were small and corkscrewed. The outsides of all of them looked woody, but when we cut them open, we found the skins to be the same thickness as store bought sweet potatoes.
They cooked up like typical sweet potatoes and tasted very good! Besides our initial trial of baked and mashed, I have used a mix of both kinds for sweet potato soup. That was very much like pumpkin soup, but a touch sweeter. I can’t say I like one better than the other, except that sweet potatoes are easier to cut open.
We also have been using a lot of them for the raw dog food we have been preparing for our two dogs for about a year and a half now. According to Cam The Dog Nutritionist, a vegetable mix should be around 10% of their diet. Maybe I’ll do a whole post on our version of that, but for now I’ll say that within a week of changing to this diet, our dogs looked incredibly healthier. Dog food has been a good way to use many of the stranger shaped sweet potatoes, because we don’t have to be quite as picky about them.
I dug up a bunch more sweet potatoes a couple weeks later, with the help of a two year old grandson. He was in charge of taking the greens to the chicken pen. The bright skins made the sweet potatoes easy enough to spot. The orange skinned ones were more prolific than the purple skinned ones.
Recommended storage was dark, but not too cold. They did say something about first curing the skins for a couple of weeks outdoors in the shade, but we didn’t have a good place or the right weather conditions to do that. We opted for our basement pantry and had pretty good shelf life with them simply on a piece of cardboard in a single layer with at least a smidge of space between each sweet potato. Because we were using them us fairly quickly, we didn’t try to figure out a different longer term arrangement, so I can’t say if they would last much through the winter in other conditions. As it is, there has been minimal rotting.
In the videos we watched, they cautioned to be careful where you plant sweet potatoes, because they can be hard to get rid of. This has also been my experience with regular potatoes, so I long ago took to just planting them in the same garden bed every year. I will be curious to see if the sweet potatoes that escaped my digging will sprout after the very low winter temperatures we usually have here in SW Idaho. My husband is building two more terraced beds on that same slope, and I may decide to try to relocate the sweet potatoes to the lowest terrace bed because of the expansive vine growth. That way the plants will flow into the chicken pen and not over the plants in the lower terrace bed.
Bottom line: I’m ready to plant sweet potatoes again.
