Introduction
Have you ever considered growing your own sweet potatoes? The process of going from a single slip to actual sweet potatoes can be long, but I must say that it is fascinating to see what lies below the soil when it comes time to harvest. While sweet potatoes may not be considered a staple in your house I recall using a decent amount of sweet potatoes when I was predominantly vegetarian my senior year of college. I would often roast them and add them to various baked dishes or to soups/stews like black bean chili. I fondly remember coming home to my apartment in the winter after being on campus all day and heating up a hot bowl of black bean sweet potato chili with a layer of shredded cheese. It warms both the soul and your bones.
My mom often combines sweet potatoes as sides in the form of roasted halved potatoes with pan seared chicken or as baked sweet potato fries when we decide to have a cheat meal and make cheeseburgers. Regardless, sweet potatoes are a delight to eat, they offer a different nutritional makeup than that offered from regular potatoes and have be cultivated by humans for at least the past 5,000 years or more in Central America.
The indigenous people of the area were quick to share their newly domesticated crop with other indigenous tribes as the sweet potato quickly spread across the Americas and on various tropical islands. Sweet potatoes were also quickly brought over to Europe as their taste was highly prized in the 16th century.
I believe it is safe to say that I am not the only one who has cherished these sweet tubers. When soil conditions are ideal there is a great amount of yield offered from this plant. If you are like me and have the desire to grow your own sweet potatoes, but are discouraged by the high price of sweet potato slips then look no further. I personally have experimented with growing my own slips and was successful this year.
Below I will include the core essentials of what it takes to grow your own sweet potato slips to help you produce sweet potatoes for eating or decorative foliage for your outdoor summer landscaping/décor. I will also include a vague time frame to help give you an idea of how long this process really takes and decide if buying sweet potato slips is a better option for you. I also am including when to plant the slips and when one should harvest their sweet potatoes from said grown slips. All of the information below will give you a great guide to growing copious amounts of food and saving a large sum of money while doing so.
If you are curious about my results with my method, please check out my latest YouTube video where I harvest sweet potatoes from 6 slips I planted earlier in the season (in 2024).
1. Supplies Needed
Now growing potatoes is not difficult. Do not let anyone sell you a course or book that will ensure you know the “correct” way to plant sweet potatoes. Like many things there are many different avenues an individual can take to get to their desired goal. All you truly need are the 4-5 essential ingredients, a sweet potato, soil (optional), water, light and time. I say that soil is optional as one can technically grow a potato in water without soil, but this requires careful observation and relatively frequent water changes as to prevent the potato from rotting due to an accumulation of bacteria feasting on the potato in the water. I learned this lesson the first year I tried to grow my own sweet potatoes and recall the water smelling foul. That is why for me, growing sweet potatoes is an activity best done in soil or something of that nature.
Many people find great success growing their own sweet potato slips in the kitchen window or any south facing window that’s for sure so long as the temperature doesn’t drop below freezing near any of the windows in the nighttime as this can damage the tuber. I personally use artificial LED grow lights in my grow rack to start my slips as I don’t have to worry about things like night time temperatures as some other people I know do.
To get these potatoes planted and growing the first thing you should consider buying is a sweet potato obviously. I just buy my seed potatoes from the grocery store. Now I don’t just pick up any old sweet potato I only buy potatoes that are organic as this reduces the chances of my potato being treated with a spudding inhibitor of some sort which is not what we want in this case. I also inspect my seed potato for any damage or bruises as these can increase the likelihood of rot to develop over time. Ideally you don’t want a potato that is too small or too big. The size of the tuber represents the initial food storage that the plant has the potential of producing without additional nutrients from the soil, indicating that a larger potato can initially produce more slips potentially than say a potato that is half the size of the initial specimen.
Time is also an important variable in this equation as sweet potatoes do take a while to produce sweet potato slips, I will go into this a bit further in detail on this subject in the next body of text, but I just wanted to remind you that the reason sweet potato slips are so expensive is because of the time/space it takes to grow them.
Here is a video of me comparing two different growing methods when planting sweet potatoes as a novice grower
2. When to Start Growing Slips
Now this is where gardening becomes less about technique and more of an art from. Everyone seems to throw out numbers and time estimates on what to expect when growing X Y and Z, but in my experience it is all relative to you and your current environment. Based on my personal research many say you can grow slips from a sweet potato in 2-8 weeks. This may be the case in ideal conditions for most, but for me it took maybe 8-10 weeks or more if I recall correctly.
There are a few variables that play a decent role in determining the likelihood of your sweet potato putting out vines and it really just depends on the temperature, lighting and moisture of the substrate in which the potato resides. I frequently see people growing sweet potato vines from a tuber in a tote/plastic container with a small greenhouse/reptile heat pad, a thermostat with a probe, and some light. They usually cover most of the potato with soil leaving some of the tuber peaking above the soil. Since sweet potatoes originate in Central America it makes sense that the plant would prefer to grow in an environment similar to that from which it was originally domesticated in.
While it is not necessary to have a heat mat and do everything 100% as I have described in this blog post I am certain that there is some good advice. I deeply recommend giving yourself plenty of time when it comes to growing sweet potato slips from scratch as there is nothing worse than waiting longer than expected to plant sweet potato slips especially if you are like me and live in a climate where your growing season is somewhat restrictive in how many sweet potatoes you can potentially grow.
Regardless, my main goal prior to my last frost date is to generate as many sweet potato slips as possible. I recall being vigilant about the task of pulling off what I considered to be mature slips and putting them into plastic solo cups of water so that they could start developing roots. Usually it only takes a few days, but if you are like me you may run into the issue of having too many plants and not enough space. Things can get a bit cumbersome especially at this time of the year when you have a lot of plants started in the house or greenhouse, but I assure you it is worth the hassle. Moral of the story give yourself extra time to experiment with growing your own slips for the first time and buy at more than one sweet potato (2-3) to try this DIY adventure with as you may have one potato rot on you, I recall losing 3 my first attempt.
3. Why You Should Grow Your Own Slips
You may be wondering why I am even bothering with growing sweet potato slips and why I am not just planting entire sweet potatoes into the ground like regular potatoes. The answer to this question is that sweet potatoes don’t really grow like regular potatoes. One potato doesn’t create a single plant and immediately start branching out to create new tubers. The potato focuses on creating vines and the vines are the ones that typically set roots down into the soil at various nodes. It is at these rooted nodes that we begin to see tuber formation as these are reserves of carbohydrates from photosynthesis. This increases the plants chance of survival and their likelihood of reproducing vegetatively in the future if the whole seed thing doesn’t work out.
Sweet potatoes although relatively cheap at the store are a fun crop to grow; one can also grow more “rare”/costly varieties at home and produce a potentially higher quality than the average tuber at the store. While the cost, time and labor may not make growing sweet potatoes “worth it” to you I think it is important to note the satisfaction one feels when digging in the ground to find the goodies that lie below from the labor of a growing season. It is a drug for me and always keeps me coming back wanting to allocate more and more space in my backyard for the cultivation of some type of tuber.
Lastly, if you have grown sweet potatoes before or are fortunate to have someone sell them locally you may have noticed the steep price for a pack of sweet potato slips (both ornamental and culinary). I should specify that my method for growing your own sweet potato slips works for both as ornamental sweet potatoes produce tubers and are technically an urban forage option if you find them downtown in planters/landscaping around businesses.
4. When to Plant Your Slips Outside
Now that you know what you will need, how to grow sweet potato slips, and why growing your own slips can be beneficial to you I think you are ready to know when the ideal time to plant your new slips is. For my experienced gardeners you can skip this section as you will probably already know what I am going to say. Those of you who may be new to the gardening scene please listen carefully, sweet potato vine is very sensitive to the cold and freezing temperatures especially when they are not established in the ground.
You may want to jump the gun and plant your slips when your supposed “last frost” day is mentioned in the local paper or in the farmer’s almanac but I beg you to give yourself a 1-2 week grace period as this can help prevent any heartache from occurring if a late frost does manage to come your way. The last thing I want to worry about has to be trying to go and scrounge together enough blankets or towels to cover my plants overnight after I just planted them and took care of them for the past month or two.
Once the danger of frost has passed you should now be safe to go and plant your precious slips into the ground. Ideally one should pick a spot that gets full sun and has rich, loamy soil. Space your plants 1-1.5 ft next to eachother and about 3-4 ft behind the row in front of them. Make sure to bury the roots of the potato slips about 2-4 inches into the soil and water thoroughly. These plants tend to enjoy a lot of water.
5. When to Harvest Your Sweet Potatoes
Once your slips are in the ground and established it may take a few weeks before the plant is up and growing all over your growing space. Once these plants are established they are relatively low maintenance overall in my opinion. You may be wondering when the best time to harvest your sweet potatoes is and the answer to that for many of us is when your garden is being put to rest prior to the first freeze of the season. In areas where you are able to grow sweet potatoes all year you can typically harvest after 4-5 months or when the leaves begin to yellow.
Conclusion
And there you have it. I just gave you the secret to saving tens if not hundreds of dollars when pursuing the sweet tuber. I tried to cover all the areas that I wanted to know more about when I was first starting to grow sweet potato slips. I encourage you to take all the videos you see on YouTube with a grain of salt as some of the environments you may be witnessing are not where you live. That being said growing sweet potatoes are not difficult, but it does take a degree of effort, humility, and determination. If at first you do not succeed try, try, try again.