At what soil and air temperatures to plant slips outside

[chrysanthemum]

I talk to my mother just about every day on the phone.  She’s an eighty-four year old widow who is still an avid gardener.  She also does a lot of other work on her property with a chainsaw or log splitter or boat on her little pond.  I call her after it’s dark for the day to make sure that she has made it safely back inside for the night.

The other day she mentioned that she had been in her basement culling out some sweet and Irish potatoes that were not good any longer.  She was also lamenting that some of her sweet potatoes were sprouting, and it’s way to early for her to have slips.  I commented that she should mail them to me since my sweet potatoes were stubbornly refusing to sprout.  We agreed that she’d grow some more later if mine didn’t start.

One of my two sweet potatoes has actually started some sprouts, and I had reported this to her, so I was very surprised to find therefore that she actually did mail me slips earlier this week.  She doesn’t know the variety (she just knows that they’re not Beauregard).  She believes it’s something that her older sister gave her years ago.  (The older sister is also still an avid gardener, as is one of the two younger sisters, and the other plants things here and there but does more flowers than vegetables.)





This is a shot of the slips straight out of the bubble wrap.  I put them in some water in some warm sun to help them feel better after their long journey.  They already have roots on them, and I’m wondering if it’s warm enough in my neck of the woods to plant them.  We just got through with a relatively cool week, and my soil temperatures are in the mid sixties.  The monthly forecast shows temperatures mostly in the eighties during the day (a few in the 70’s in the early part of the but also spiking up above 90 this week); the nights are in the 50’s, warming to the 60’s.  

If night temperatures are still too cool, I can pot them up, so to speak, the way I do my tomatoes and peppers.  I should have space if I get the tomatoes in the ground tomorrow.  I’ve never had slips ready early enough to worry about cool nights down here, so this is entirely new to me.  I’d appreciate some advice on what I should do with these.

[macmex]

Yes, you can pot them. Sometimes that what a person has to do because slips are ready too early to go outside. However, I recommend something that seems counterproductive. When you do plant them outside, pull them and break off most, if not all the roots. 

The main reason folk tend to have bad results with sweet potato plants they've purchased from box stores is that they are in pots and have become root bound (something that would occur within a week or so of potting a slip). Then, when they plant them, they just slip them out of the pot and plant, with all those gnarled roots still attached to the plant. Those end up being the first roots to make sweet potatoes, and they're a mess.

From what you report of your temperatures, I'd say your about able to plant outside now. I always say that one can plant sweet potato slips when nights are warm enough that one doesn't need to wear a sweater. Anything above 50 F should be okay, especially since day time temps are in the 80s and 90s.

I missed your question until finding it today.

[chrysanthemum]

You didn’t miss the question for very long.  I only posted it Friday night.  Thanks for the quick reply.

The slips are still in water at the moment.  I didn’t have time to do anything with them yet.  This coming week is a bit of a break for us from our regular homeschooling routine, so I hope to get some extra garden work in as I can.  I still need to add compost to the bed where the sweet potatoes will go.

I have read some of your posts on sweet potatoes before, so your comment about pulling the roots off made perfect sense to me.  I do a lot of reading about gardening, but occasionally I will watch a video that I find recommended somewhere, and I recently watched one that included the same warning about roots.  (I also particularly liked the method he showed of putting the slips in the ground.)



I have the slips out in the sunshine now.  They were grown inside in Virginia, so I figure they need some time to adjust to our level of sunlight down here.

[chrysanthemum]

We had some high winds blow in last night and drop the temperatures. They were continuing to blow strongly this morning, and I found it cold outside even with my fleece jacket. I have a big pot where I planted the sweet potato slips my mother sent, and I have a smaller planter where I bedded a couple of grocery store sweet potatoes, one of which is growing slips. I decided to move those indoors out of the cold wind. They’re staying inside for the night as it will drop to the mid forties. (I still haven’t gotten compost to amend the bed where they will go. It was on the agenda for the day, but other important things happened instead.)

I try to make sure that all my ollas in the garden get topped off on Saturdays, and I usually do it in the mornings. This morning it was too cold, though. My husband and I spent a good chunk of the day fixing a plumbing problem, and we went out after that was done to take care of filling those ollas. As I was working in one of the beds, a new plant caught my eye. It was a sweet potato sprout where we must have missed something during the harvest last year. I guess the soil is warm enough, though I don’t know how it will feel about several nights in the forties. It gets to stay there for now as there is some room in the bed. We’ll see if I can get the vines not to take over its neighbors, though.

[macmex]

That's amazing that you had a volunteer! I've never had that happen here. We had it happen all the time in Mexico, were winter temps only dipped into the upper 20s sporadically, during the winter, hanging out at tee shirt to sweater temps the rest of the time.

You did the right thing. Bringing them in to stay warm is a good thing. Though the greenhouse could have maintained itself above the danger level lately, I've kept a space heater going at night. I don't just want my sweets to be "okay," I want them to be "happy."

[chrysanthemum]

Amazingly enough, three volunteers! (Especially amazing given our devastating freeze in February.) I found the other two this morning. I wonder if more will be coming.

I have the hardest time sacrificing volunteer plants, so I really want to save these. The problem is that the bed is already planted with my indeterminate tomatoes, and they’re going to use the trellis. I thought I could manage one sweet potato volunteer, but three is pushing it, and now I’m suspecting that there may well be more. My husband did the harvesting last year, and I went through the soil afterwards. I wonder if these came from bits and pieces that we left behind because of rodent damage. Can I just transplant them when I get my other sweet potato bed ready? Any special technique or caution?

Macmex, that greenhouse photo is beautiful. Please post more pictures in your greenhouse thread and give us a “tour.” Do I see basil in the front, or is that some unusual sweet potato?

We have an old shed on our property that we tried to have the children use as a clubhouse, but they haven’t taken it over. The foundation is solid with a pretty good wood floor, but the doors have fallen off in high winds, and the roof leaks, so it needs some rehabilitation. It does have electricity. I’d love to turn it into a greenhouse, but I know little about greenhouse growing and think it could be tricky with the temperature extremes we get here. I could imagine burning seedlings even in winter. (I don’t have any serious plans to undertake this, by the way. I just have a good imagination.)

[chrysanthemum]

Here’s an update on my sweet potato slips.







The palmate leaves are the slips that my mother mailed to me.  I potted them in a big pot, and they have been growing happily on a table on our back deck to adjust to Texas sunshine and wind.  I had to have my husband carry them inside and out for me a couple of times this week because of cold nighttime temperatures, and they’ve spent the last two days entirely inside.  I’m hoping they can got out this morning, but I’m watching the weather forecast for storms.

The cordate leaves are the slips that I started from two grocery store potatoes.  Only one has produced slips, but they are quite vigorous.  I’m wondering if I can bury those longer ones mostly horizontally to get rooting at the nodes.  

We’re behind on our garden really.  I like to amend beds early, but the spot for the sweet potatoes still has a thick layer of wood chip mulch from last summer.  I’ll need to pull some of that off because it isn’t broken down enough for me to want to bury it, and we need to get some bulk compost to add to the soil before I can plant slips.  Getting the bed ready is the plan for tomorrow.

[macmex]

First: yes, you did spot basil. I really need to break those up and re-pot them.

Also, yes, you can do any number of things with long slips. You can cut them into short pieces and plant them, even without roots. Almost without exception every piece will root and grow. Here's another option. When planting my slips, one year, I had an exceptionally long one. I just stuck each end in the soil, about 15" apart. That way I accomplished the same as if I'd had two shorter slips. It worked!


I'm going to do something different this year. I have tons of slips, ready to go, and it's only "about to warm up enough" to ship or plant. Every year I sell out of one variety and struggle to meet demand. I've already started a whole lot more roots of that variety. But now they have really large slips and are not able to travel. I'm going to do another tray and start pulling the slips from the roots, planting them in the tray to hold them over a bit. This will encourage new sprouts on the roots in the original tray. I absolutely will not ship "slips" with root balls. I'll either cut them off, sending as "cuts," or I'll strip off most of the roots before shipping.

[chrysanthemum]

I planted my slips out yesterday.  (The soil temperature was 66 to 68.)  I shoveled off the half-decomposed wood chip mulch, and my husband replaced it with aged manure compost that he picked up in bulk in the morning.  I did tear off the roots from the slips as well as lower leaves and tried to bury them as deeply as I could.  I still have the old mulch in a cart by the garden, and I’ll try to put that back on once they’ve settled in and grown out a bit.  

I left the potato that had produced my homegrown slips in its planter and gave it another good watering.  I’m curious to see if it produces more slips.

[chrysanthemum]

Something got into my garden last night and dug big holes in my sweet potato bed (and in one of the pathways).  Thankfully the plants didn’t appear to be too disturbed, though I had to fix up a few slips, especially the really long vines that I had buried.  If you look really closely at the cordate leaved vine, you can see where it had started rooting along the stem.

I’m guessing it was an armadillo.  There were no holes at the bottom of the fencing.  We have a rabbit fence at the bottom, with higher fencing added on top to keep deer out (with plastic mesh fencing outside of that when I realized that deer were pushing their noses through the squares and grabbing some plants).  Do armadillos climb?  Could one have climbed between the rabbit and deer fencing where it was secured tightly enough together?

[macmex]

I have not heard of climbing armadillos, but I understand that they can be pretty small when young. It does look like armadillo damage. Might there be a hole in your fence? Armadillos are easy to trap. They walk along walls, fences and barriers, so a live trap can be placed along such a barrier and they walk right into it.

[chrysanthemum]

I love that description of your slips in your kitchen window, Bon.

Saturday morning the garden looked good, and we had enough break in the the thunder that my husband and I went through securing the rabbit fence to the the deer fence in more places and the poly mesh to both with zip ties. Obviously it didn’t help because this morning I found big holes in the other half of the sweet potato bed. I had to do emergency replanting before getting my kids ready for Sunday School because about six slips had disappeared. I found them all dug up and flung about or just buried under shifted soil. I’m glad in a sense that they’re just disturbing new slips, but we did borrow two live traps from the next door neighbors and tried to use them along the edges of the bed where it’s been digging. We just set those up this evening.

It’s kind of strange because the sweet potato bed is really the only place it’s digging and a bit in the pathways. I’m very thankful it hasn’t uprooted any of my other plants in other beds. I was thinking that there might be some skinks living under that bed because of a couple holes I’d seen and a little head that popped up in one corner the other day. Whatever it is I guess the armadillo can smell it, and it’s really tasty because it so far has stuck to that one part of the garden, and it’s a pretty small garden.

[heavyhitterokra]

I remember when armadillos were an oddity around here. We never saw one until the mid-'70s. Now, 45 years later, they're everywhere you look.

[chrysanthemum]

May 5, 2021 16:58:48 GMT -6 heavyhitterokra said:

I remember when armadillos were an oddity around here. We never saw one until the mid-'70s. Now, 45 years later, they're everywhere you look.

I’m going to start a separate thread in the wildlife section about armadillos.  My sweet potatoes are pretty resilient, but they’ve probably been dug up four times now.  I don’t know how much more they can take.

I do have more slips growing from my mother sweet potato that I left in the little planter where I bedded it this spring.  I am growing them for my neighbor who has extra room in her garden, but I may get some replacements.