Yesterday's mail

brought the sweet potato slips!

I've talked about this before but I'll recap here. The folks at one of my favorite seed companies, New Hope Seed Company just north of Memphis, work with a local sweet potato farmer to make slips available to New Hope customers. The slips are shipped, via USPS, to you when it's time to plant them in your area. Twelve slips cost $16.95. Plants are also available in quantities of 25, 50, 100, 500, and 1000 (for $174.50). 

Sweet potatoes are indestructible. These plants are sitting on the kitchen windowsill. I will get them in the ground this weekend, but if for some reason I weren't able, they would last for weeks just sitting here in an inch of water. Sure, some might not make it, but do you have any idea how many sweet potatoes 12 sweet potato slips will yield? 

A lot. And this was only about six plants' worth.

In fact, we still have a few of edible size from last year. 

Once in the ground, nothing but accidentally spraying them with RoundUp will kill them. So long as the soil is fairly loose, they have no particular soil requirements-- in other words, they do not need to be fertilized. They even grow well in containers (think sweet potato vine, a stable plant in big pots of flowers). No need to water unless there's a severe drought. No diseases or insect pests. Mammals are a problem, but not one from which they cannot recover. Most years the deer eventually find my patch and eat the foliage down to the ground. Not a problem. They'll sprout new foliage and keep on growing.

Harvesting is easy (especially in containers). Cure them in the sun for a while, put them single layer in a box and tuck them away in a cool dry place. That's it. 

Good Lord! I can't believe more people don't grow their own sweet potatoes. 

It's so easy!