Starting Sweet Potato Slips

We love sweet potatoes. They are nutritious, sweet, versatile, and easy to grow. We are still eating last year's sweet potatoes, which we keep packed in dry hay, in cardboard boxes, in our kitchen. Our favorites are sweet potato hash browns, simple baked sweet potatoes, and sweet potato muffins! The chickens like sweet potatoes, too.
Starting your own sweet potato slips is easy. All you need are a few sweet potatoes, a space to keep them warm, and some soil or sand to cover them up with. You can get a LOT of fresh, healthy shoots for transplanting without a lot of effort. Your shoots can be much nicer than the bunched sweet potato slips you often see at garden centers in spring. And besides, they usually sell out before most of us can get any, anyway! So here's how we do it:


Our process starts around late March, about 8-10 weeks before we will be transplanting. We start our sweet potatoes in our hoophouse, a 10X30X6' single-layer plastic tunnel. In the above picture, you can see how we start them; we set a small wooden box frame (just four walls) down into the soil, and set the potatoes in the bottom.

These potatoes are two different varieties. One variety is the organic sweet potatoes from our local coop, and the other, called Mahon, is from a friend and heirloom enthusiast, Rodger Winn. According to him, it is "the" sweet potato to grow. You can find more about him at www.rodgersheirlooms.com


Next we cover the sweet potatoes with about 6-8 inches of sand or soil. For the next few weeks, we just keep the sand (or soil) warm (65-85 degrees is good, but warmer is better), and moist. The sweet potatoes will send shoots up that will emerge out of the sand and put on leaves. When we are ready to transplant into the field, (which is hopefully when the shoots have a good 4-6 inches of leafy growth, we simply dig up the tubers and shoots. Each tuber will have 10-20 sweet potato "slips" that we can plant and that will become their own sweet potato plant! Since the shoots had to emerge through 6-8 inches of sand, they have a long, rooty section that helps them get established in the field. We simply snap off each shoot from its tuber, and transplant it into the field. As always, it is essential to keep the transplants moist for their first few days.

An old window provides an extra layer of heat on those cooler spring days. Sweet potatoes need warm temperatures to put on new shoot growth, so don't be afraid to heat them up to 85, even 90 degrees. I tend to keep the window open a bit just so it doesn't get too hot on a sunny day. If the night is going to get too cold, I make sure to cover the window and box with a heavy blanket late in the day, before the sun goes down, to hold in heat through the night.