Sunday, May 22, 2011

Sunday Gardening News! Sweet Potatoes! May 22, 2011

Good Sunday to you!
Today, I wanted to talk a bit about sweet potatoes and how to grow them.
This is just my second season to grow sweet potatoes but they worked out so good last year I wanted to grow them again.


Growing Sweet Potatoes

If you live in an area that is blessed with long hot summers, you might try growing sweet potatoes.
Last year, I got slips, (that's what the plants are called) from a seller and grew Beauregard sweet potatoes. I just liked the name, didn't know anything about them.
I didn't have garden space for all of them so I planted them in big containers on the porch and I also 3 tires out in the yard with about 3 slips each.
Of all the things I've tried to grow in containers, I have to say that sweet potatoes were the best. The yields were surprising actually.
I had I'm guessing, 20 or more, pounds of potatoes from the 3 tires and 3 large 8 gal. pots on the porch. That seems like pretty good yeild for the space to me, and the potatoes were nice big tasty things too.
Sweet potatoes are one of those rare things you can grow every year if you save some potatoes to start slips from.
I had put back 6 nice potatoes for just that purpose.
Make sure you pick out good healthy potatoes with no spots or signs of disease too.
Now a lot of people have different ways of starting their potatoes, I have a bed in the greenhouse that is just peat moss and I nestled the potatoes down flat on their sides and watered them to keep the soil moist. It wasn't long before plants started to develop and this morning, I picked a pile of beautiful shoots that I'll plant later today after the sun goes down a bit.
I have ready several big pots. And I still have 2 tires left after filling 3 of them with potato onions so I'll be able to have a couple tires full of sweet potatoes at the edge of the garden again this year. The biggest potatoes I grew came out of the tires. I just use one as a bed, dig up the ground good, set the tired down on the turned earth and fill up with good soil that has plenty of sand and  compost mixed in.

Sweet potatoes are kin to morning glories so they want to put out lots of long vines and are really pretty plants to look at.
If you have good southern exposure on a porch or deck you might consider putting in some sweet potatoes there.

This winter, I liked to cut up the potatoes like fries and put them in the frier. Sweet potato french fries are delicious with maple syrup on them. You should try it!

Here are some links to information I found on the net about sweet potatoes.
Check out how HEALTHY sweet potatoes are!
And here, this article says that Japanese sweet potatoes are the ultimate Detox Food!
I don't know about you guys, but after yesterday, I could sure use some Detoxin' ! LOL

To sum up, if you haven't started growing slips to plant out, it's too late now but, you can order them online or perhaps find a grower in your area to buy from. I bought mine online last year and they did great.
Once you get going, you can grow your own next year but by all means, start you some sweet potatoes !

Just a heads up for those interested, Mike Ruppert will be airing his speech that he's giving today with Dimitri Orlov. It will be on the LifeBoat Hour radio show tonight.

5 comments:

  1. Thanks seems the UK will be warm enough this year and thanks for the MCR heads up.
    From Rice Farmer
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/8526639/Ban-on-washing-cars-this-summer-as-new-hosepipe-bans-come-in.html

    My blog
    http://slightlypreoccupied.blogspot.com/

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  2. well Hello Rice Farmer!!! thanks for stopping by, I'm happy to see you!
    Hope that you guys have a good summer across the pond and you can grow you some tasty sweet potatoes!
    thanks for that link too, I'll sure put it up tomorrow and can't wait to go read your blog!
    I'm excited to hear Mike's talk tonight. I hope they have the question and answer segment with him and Orlov on there too.

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  3. Rice Farmer is in Japan, credited him? with my first sight of the link.
    I am 'slightly preoccupied' and 'ebrutto' on Facebook.

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  4. No Orlov...MCR managed a few micro weeps and plagiarised some other peoples ideas - about normal for MCR, sigh ;-)

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  5. Oh goodness, I'm sorry!
    thank you for the link though, I just read that wrong! LOL
    it's been a long day!
    I love your blog BTW, I'm going to link to it in tomorrow's post.
    and thanks for the update on LifeBoat hour. I couldn't get the player to work on this comp. Need more plugins or something! It's always something isn't it!

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