Sweet Potato Slips

I had tremendous success with my sweet potatoes last year and so I plan to grow them again this year–we even added another bed along that same fence to grow them. So, I want to start my own sweet potato slips myself. This is definitely going to be a multi-part blog post over time.

When I dug the potatoes, I had a bucket of really tiny ones that were too small to do much with.

You can’t tell scale from the photo, but they are probably 3″ long and about 1-1/2″ diameter on average.

I grabbed some nursery pots and I put some rehydrated coir to hold moisture for them, about 1/2 of the pot.

Then I stuck the sweet potato pointy-ish end down.

Then I filled them up with more coir.

Then I watered them really well.

Then I took them over to the cold frame that my husband built me for Christmas. I know–what a fantastic gift for a gardener! He built it out of some ladder guarding that they were discarding where he works. (You can see that my kale is still doing really well, despite some extremely cold days we’ve had here. I cleaned off all the damaged/dead leaves last weekend.)

I put my trays of pots in the cold frame (which was SIGNIFICANTLY warmer than the ambient temperature).

So, now we’ll just have to see if they sprout. 

To grow sweet potatoes, you let them sprout leaves and let those grow some and then pull the sprouts off and put them in water to let the sprouts develop roots. I’ve never done this before so we’ll see how well it works.

More to come!