I make my own curing chamber with a deep, lidded plastic storage bin with an open mason jar of water inside and a seed starting heat mat underneath. Works great!
I already have next years going. I just sip off part of a vine before harvest to keep in water over the Winter. When the vines get to long I cut it and put that in water as well. So when Spring arrives the are ready to be planted.
I recently harvest a huge sweet tater! Almost 6 lbs! Missouri. I have not harvested the rest of the 4’x8’ bed yet. Can’t wait to see what else is in there!
Nice Tatters! Im in Florida 9B, I grow them year round in 30 gallon containers and vines are on trellises . Harvest is easy, cut vines, remove trellis, dump them onto a tarp and let treasure hunt begin. Since I grow them year round, I save some of the vines to root for the next crop.
I hope they taste as good as they look. I'm growing my second batch this year in my old wheel barrow and last year I got about 15 pounds. These are plants from slips from last year's harvest and I will likely do it again next year. They were some of the biggest, best tasting sweet potatoes I've ever had. Another nice video Brian. Thanks.
I have done both methods before, and in my experience the plants grown from left-behinds always do better, but they also take a few weeks longer to mature. The cracking and color difference from your slip-grown seems to indicate they were overly mature, whereas your tuber-grown looked perfect. I now deliberately salvage my too-small tubers and stick them back in the bed at the end of the year. In essence, I have a perennial bed.
What zone are you in? And does “end of the year “ mean end of December or end of your growing season? We had some small tubers I would like to try and grow from for the next growing season but I don’t know how to store for replanting or when to plant them. Can you advise, please?
@@Pudelmum I am zone 7a. I replant the small ones as soon as I harvest, so late Summer. Once you get a bed going you will have lots of volunteers anyway from left behind roots and missed tubers. They will sprout before frost, but that's okay. I leave the foliage on and just cover everything with mulch. Do not water over the wintertime, it will rot the overwintering roots. When they sprout in Spring, fill in the gaps with sprouted cuttings or slips. If you don't have at least 3 weeks before frost in your area (to establish roots) just cure your baby tubers along with the big ones, then store in a cool dark spot, and plant as soon as the ground is workable in your area.
Impressive harvest from the volunteer plants. I grew some last year from slips and had a HUGE, good-looking harvest. Unfortunately, I had trouble properly storing them after curing and lost many due to rot. You've inspired me to try them again next year. P.S. It was great to see Bella wandering around free in the background!
You don’t have to cure them to eat them. I cooked up a bunch of mine right off the bat and put them in 2 pound bags and freeze them for pies and other stuff.
I just cooked a small one that I dug a few days ago. It didn’t really have much taste, but I expected that due to lack of curing. I decided to treat it like an Irish potato and pan fry its slices with onion and eggs.
I never knew you were supposed to plant by slips until starting to binge watch gardening and homesteading videos a few months ago! I have only ever plunked a sweet potato or two with a few sprouts into the ground in various places from subtropical Queensland to here on the Far South Coast of NSW. I always got a decent crop. This year, I'm growing just one in a bag. I have used the leaves a few times, they're ok, but I'm getting keen to dig up and see what I got for the first time in this garden.
I harvested mine 1 1/2 weeks ago. I was surprised and shocked that I was even able to get any. Due to a very late transplant of 5 slips... I was able to harvest 6 large tators and 3/4 of dozen partials. I am looking forward to eating them, as well as growing them next year in a dedicated bed. Thanks for all the advice and How To videos
Thanks to your videos - I had a good harvest; I planted the slips in 20 ga. pots. Perhaps you-all can share recipe's of what you do with them on your homestead channel as some of mine are small and oddly shaped. I never thought I could grow sweet potatoes I actually did not know what a slip was... but thanks to you I now have a bunch.
Thank you Brian, I followed your instructions on starting my own sweet potato starts and had great success. I was able to get a great harvest here in Eugene OR zone 8b and now have mine curing in my greenhouse, not ideal temp but this week it should be much warmer and temp in greenhouse should be close to 90 for part of the day. Thanks again for all your help on growing sweet potatoes.
Nice harvest! I grew them 2 years from potatoes because I didn't know at the time that you have to grow them from slips and they were fine and a lot of foliege. This year I grew them slips and looks terrible, will see!
I forgot to mention that I sauteed some of the leaves and found them to be very tasty, next year I will harvest some of the leaves throughout the season to add to an omlet in place of spinach.
I was watching your video on over wintering pepper plants and you recommended fabric pots from grassroots, which of the pots would be better to use for over wintering peppers, the Living Soil Fabric Pot or the Classic Fabric Pot?
I harvested 4 out of 14 plants the other day. They were still a bit small even though they had already bloomed. Leaves a re still green so going too leave them a couple more weeks as long as the frost doesn't kill them. Does a deep water help them fatten up? They are in a poly tunnel to extend my short Canadian season
Last year my slips grew into maybe 3-10 leaves. No potatoes. This year I have hundreds of leaves. Looking forward to the day I hear we have a frost coming, to finally see what’s been growing under there!
Save and dry all the banana peels you can get your hands on then crumple them up and add them to compost you put around your sweet potatoes. You will be surprised what you get next fall.
This is my second year growing from slips. Orange and purple sweet potatoes and for the second time it all came out looking like strings with the biggest maybe the size of a pencil. What am I doing wrong?
I planted slips from tan colored sweet potatoes and the ones I harvested had a redish coloring to them, not sure of the variety but I bought just said organic sweet potatoes on the label?
Slips are the stems and leaves that grow from the sweet potato. Some people put the base of the potato in water and let it root and start growing slips. Others put the potatoes in dirt sideways and let it grow. Hope that helps
Throw your sweet potatoes in a tied trash bag. Lay them in one layer thick. Put them in the sun for 5 days. Do not wash. You don't need to spray any water in. They cure with that.
Biggest issue about coloring and suspected sweet potato failures. There are NO real sweet potato failures ! You were sold yams (mistakenly or deliberately mislabelled as sweet potatoes - for a higher price point - and sales) instead of real sweet potatoes ! Yams are smaller, lighter-colored as pink or red-pink - and smaller production. True sweet potatoes (with higher pro-Vitamin A carotene aka coloring) have greater size, greater production ... and the more glaring red, red-orange, and orangey bright colored tuber skins. If you find you have lighter-colored and various smaller tubers - suspect that you got "yammed" (suckered) into buying yams. MAKE SURE.
Thank you so much for this Information. This harvest looks completely different from last year. They are smaller shaped differently. Some also have a different color. This makes a lot of sense what you described.
You could be correct, however, the yams I am familiar with are dark brownish-black or purplish and hairy looking, with a crevice down the middle. Confusingly, sweet potatoes come in many colors. It’s enough to give anyone a headache. 😂
@@danasmith3664 The whole subject of sweet potatoes is a study in itself for preppers. There are over 3000 worldwide varieties of sweets - with Japan growing up to 43 different varieties. Look up "Types of Sweet Potatoes." These are the 14 common commercially-grown (actual) "sweet potatoes." Sweet potato varieties can be color-divided into 8 basic types: White flesh with - white, yellow, purple skin Orange flesh with - white, orange, red, purple skin Purple flesh with - purple skin Each variety will have a unique flavor, soft-to-hard texture, and fibrosity. This further breaks into sweet or starchy varieties. Sweet potatoes (scientific name lpomoea batatas) are often called “yams” in the United States. However, true yams (Dioscorea sp.) are starchy edible roots that are white in color and have tough skin, which makes them difficult to peel. Such white flesh with white skin sweet potatoes (being starchy) could be easily misidentified and misnamed as "yams." The same for white skin - white flesh yams that (ahem !) could be deliberately mis-named as (higher priced) sweet pototoes. You only gave the skin color - so the flesh color further identifies the actual variety you mention. Look up sweetpotatoplants. They show 11 photos of their sweet potatoes. Look up George's Plant Farm and look at their photos. I know of no sweet potatoes or yams that have a crevice in them - unless you are growing in hard or rocky soil and the tuber had to scrape-by or grow around some soil (or genetic) defect. All are mostly cylindrical with varying sizes, girths, and lengths - along with their skin and flesh colorings, textures, and sweetness/starchiness. Your tater ~could be~ a Kotobuki, Murasaki, Purple Passion, or a Red Japanese, From your words, you have sweet potatoes - misnamed as yams.
MAKE SURE that you have SWEET POTATOES (not yams) for eating the vastly nutritious vines and leaves. Only sweet potatoes (constantly mislabelled yams for sweet potatoes in American grower markets) have edible vines and leaves - yams vines and leaves inedible. MAKE SURE. If a "Vegetti" (or clone) machine can handle a sweet potato chunk, you can then process and make curly spaghetti fries, alongside all the other carrot, beet, cucumber. et al spaghettis. Also make sweet potato fries, potato chips. Air-dried, or especially freeze dried, these are one of the long-lasting high density foods (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, ... bull rush water chestnut corms).
