Garden Experiments: Starting Slips from Sweet Potatoes

A long, long, time ago I started some sweet potatoes in water, with the hopes that they would grow "slips", and that I would be able to plant those slips in my garden and grow more sweet potatoes. You can read all about my initial endeavor, here.

It's now been two months. After the first month and a bit, I noticed absolutely nothing was progressing. So I cut the sweet potatoes in half, thinking that might help. And again, time went on and, well frankly, nothing.  This week, I was about done with it all. The sweet potatoes were not looking great, so I thought I would just throw them out - I did just buy these from a supermarket, and I did read that if they got close to 'freezing' at any point it wouldn't work anyways. I figured they were duds, and that I didn't want the house to start smelling like rotting sweet potatoes, and windowsill space is prime sunning property for my indoor plant starts.

The first one I pulled up was rotten - I will save you the gross and mushiness of a picture of it. The second one surprised me...

When I pulled it up, we had three roots! So it was alive, sort of! I more closely examined the sweet potatoes, and found one, single bud on it:

It is not at all very big yet...I still wouldn't even claim it will be 100% viable. But it is a sign of life.

I'm not sure if it is far enough along, to be a successful "slip" but the time I need to plant it out at the end of May / early June. But, knowing this, I may try again next year starting even sooner. We will have to see. It might also just be that there wasn't enough window light / warmth during the beginning of this experiment to push it along like it needed to be.

Regardless, it was a surprising discovery after what I thought was a failed experiment. 

I will keep you all updated.

Gardening Experiments: Starting Slips from Sweet Potatoes

Of the many new gardening 'items' I am attempting this year - growing sweet potatoes is one of them. It started out with myself YouTube-ing how to grow potatoes in containers (which I am also attempting this year, hopefully), and that lead to post of people growing sweet potatoes.

Now, since sweet potatoes don't really grow the same as potatoes - at all - potatoes you just dump in the ground and hill around them, sweet potatoes you plant the vine and it vines along the ground. The first trick to growing sweet potatoes is to get your hands on "slips" - the starter plants. Since I wasn't sure where to order slips, and then only found one place that actually sold them, and have never been a fan of buying real plants in the mail...ramble ramble... I thought I would try growing them myself. All the people on YouTube did it and so have a bunch of 10 year old kids in elementary school, so I should be able to. Hopefully.

Anyways, to make your own slips, supposedly you suspend your sweet potatoes in water for a couple weeks, and then growth will start. It's all really reminiscent of a elementary school science experiment. You make sure the rooting end is down, and the growing / vining end up! The growing end will be the end where it was pulled from the vine originally, and the rooting end will be, typically, more narrow and will not have the nubbin from being pulled off the vine.

Then you wait. Once your leafy growth is so long / high, you clip it off, and put it in water to allow root growth on the ends before planting outside. All sounds easy peasy...

So I went to the grocery store, and I bought myself two sweet potatoes - as you see above. I did read warnings that grocery store sweet potatoes may not provide slips if they have been treated with anything, or if they had been stored below a certain temperature, etc and etc. Other websites have said this is bogus. I'm going with the experimental route - if I don't notice any sort of growth on these guys in two weeks then I'm going to change my game plan. I started now, with all this snow on the ground, because like all good gardening things - it takes time to grow. Plus I want some extra time in case these don't grow.

I'm still not sure where I will plant them. Containers or in the garden or flower beds are both options. They are vining ground cover - so maybe in a vegetable based flower bed to prevent weeds. We will see. From what I saw in the videos, since we are short season here (compared to... let's say California, hehe), there will only really be formation of tublers (sweet potatoes) where the slip is. There won't be time for the slip to grow long and re-root pieces of itself and grow sweet potatoes. I should actually maybe try preventing that to direct all the energy to the main slips.

Now, all this googling did lead me to growing ginger!!! Now that I can grow in a pot as well...hrmm...

Are you growing anything different this year? Any garden experiments?