Beauregard Sweet Potato variety

[macmex]

I just started a thread on Beauregard, over on the Sweet Potato Network. Thought it might interest you folks too. I know Ron grows Beauregard from time to time.

George

[chrysanthemum]

I have fond memories of Beauregard sweet potatoes because my father was very interested in it when it was being developed at LSU.  He was an alumnus of the school, and I believe that we actually drove down there one summer in the late 1980’s (after returning my grandmother to her home in north Louisiana) and picked up slips for my mother to plant in the garden.  She maintained the plants and roots for him to enjoy for many years.  Now that he’s gone, she grows a different sweet potato that got from my aunt years ago and grows in a more contained fashion.

I have plants of my aunt’s variety growing from slips that my mother mailed to me, but I also have some vines from a grocery store potato that I bought this year.  I don’t know for a fact that it’s Beauregard, but I operate on the assumption that it is.  The sweet potatoes themselves have the right appearance as do the vines.  When I’ve grown others in the past, the flowers match as well.

After I had fully planted my bed, I let the mother (Beauregard) sweet potato produce more slips.  I planted them in an empty bed in my next door neighbors’ garden.  The husband loves sweet potatoes, so I hope they’ll do well.  They’re vining all over that bed but can be turned back in when they escape (so far).

Just recently, I harvested a third batch of slips and planted them in a big plastic nursery pot (maybe a leftover from a tree that the previous owners of our house had bought?) and have them on our back deck.  At that point I even pulled up the sweet potato and fried slices in a tempura batter recently.  It might not have been as good as a less used potato, but my kids still loved it.

Here’s a shot I took of the sweet potatoes to send to my mother a couple of weeks ago.  The two different growth habits and leaf shapes are very striking.  If we get a good crop of both, it will be interesting to see which my kids prefer for taste.

[macmex]

There you go. Beauregard has become a family heirloom! 
That other variety has leaves like Ginseng Orange, but then, I believe some of the Puerto Rico varieties have the same leaf style. Years ago we got a start of a split leaf sweet potato from my wife's grandmother in southern Illinois. She didn't know what variety it was, but I suspect it was a Puerto Rico variety. It had more contained vines and produced a nice copper colored, orange fleshed root.

That garden looks really nice.

[heavyhitterokra]

I've had Beauregards reach 10 pounds here before. They've been a really reliable potato for us to grow in Northeast Oklahoma.

Below, is an excerpt from one of my Beauregard posts back in 2019:

Josh and I started digging up one of our Beauregard sweet potato plants right before dusk tonight. We got 37.6 pounds of potatoes off of the one vine before it got too dark to continue following the roots.

The biggest tuber weighed 10.6 pounds, the runner up weighed 9.6 pounds, the third largest one was 5.8 pounds and an assortment of softball size to golf ball size stragglers made up the remaining 11.6 pounds.

My son, John says, "Big potatoes just make the steak look smaller." I'll be the first to say, "That boy can sure sock away a lot of steak!" You wouldn't want to sponser him on an 'All You Can Eat Buffet'. I don't believe even he could finish that 10.6 pound potato that he's been here eyeing tonight though.

[john]

Beauregard is a fantastic variety. That rivals all of the new ones coming out. Plus no patents to worry about either.

[chrysanthemum]

On Saturday when I was watering the garden, I noticed some bulges of sweet potatoes coming through my mulch.  I checked my garden journal this morning and determined that it had been 120 days since planting my slips.  My daughter and I dug in two spots with our hands to see what we would find.





The large potatoes came from one spot, the smaller ones from a corner where they were more crowded.  (My whole bed is crowded, of course, since it’s only two feet wide and had clay pots buried throughout.). You can see the obvious gnawing on some, but I’ve cut damage off in the past and still cured successfully, so I’ll try that on the ones that are mostly good.  I was very pleased with the large ones and really wouldn’t want them to get much bigger.  After the rough start the slips had with being dug up multiple times, I’m pretty pleased with our initial check.

I have an unknown variety from my mother in the other part of my bed.  We checked those and found much smaller sweets.  We’ll give them a while longer.





The pastry mat measurements are in centimeters, by the way, not inches, so 15 centimeters is about 6 inches.

[macmex]

Beauregard makes BIG roots, faster than any other variety I know.

[chrysanthemum]

It does seem to be a good variety for my climate. I harvested the rest on Saturday and got about 10.5 pounds (10.5 pounds total, not for one sweet potato like heavyhitterokra ). There were large grubs in bed, and I think maybe they were doing the chewing. There was a lot of chewing damage, but I think the roots will still cure and provide some nice meals. I think the total was 17 pounds for six slips.

2/3 of my sweet potatoes are my other varitety, perhaps Ginseng as Macmex suggested above. The description seems to fit. They haven’t bulked up yet, so I’m waiting to harvest them till later in the season. They were planted the same time as my Beauregards, but they are taking longer to mature.

I planted a bunch of Beauregard slips in my neighbors’ garden in mid May (about three weeks after mine). I’ll be interested to see how they do later in the season.

[chrysanthemum]

I have been leaving my sweet potatoes in the freezer compartment of our broken garage refrigerator for curing (door ajar). It has been very hot and humid in the garage this summer as usual, but we’re starting to get cooler temperatures, and I figured I’d better think about putting the potatoes in basket and boxes in my pantry. (There isn’t really a cool spot in my house for them at this point as there is no basement.). I noticed that some of the second round I harvested have started to sprout. Anyone know why? Did I just leave them in high heat and humidity too long?

On Saturday I might do some more exploratory digging in my sweet potato bed and see how the (possible) Ginsengs are coming along.

I helped my neighbors harvest some sweet potatoes from their bed. They just dug in a few spots and pulled up some really nice roots without any apparent chewing damage. I think they’ll have a really great harvest when they do the whole bed.

[chrysanthemum]

I did some digging in the Ginseng bed yesterday and found a mixed bag of results. The first one I pulled up (probably because the ground was bulging in that spot) was a big round one with fresh sprouts starting to grow out of it. I figured that the crop was ready, but the others I dug in the area were definitely smaller, some not even worth the harvest.

I needed to do lots of other garden work, so I left the rest of the bed, not wanting to harvest a bunch of sweet potatoes that are too small to be worth it. I am confused, though, about the big one that was sprouting. Do I just break off the sprouts and cure it with the others. Do I need to eat it earlier rather than try to store it?

[macmex]

Some varieties will start sprouting on new roots. It doesn't affect their eating quality or storage ability. I don't recall how long yours have been planted. Assuming they've been planted for over 100 days, the main reason I've encountered for an undersized harvest is lack of moisture or lack of consistent moisture. Sometimes one will get lots of little roots from the vines where they rooted, farther out from the plant, but then, when this happens, the roots right under the original plant should be good size.

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks for that reassurance, macmex. I was worried about the storage ability, but I feel better now. The latest harvest is curing in my garage now. We had a few days of (beautiful) low humidity, but it’s back with a vengeance today. At least it’s good curing weather.

Consistent moisture is definitely a challenge for me in this area. This summer has been rainier than I have ever seen, but I still do A LOT of watering. I don’t have an automatic setup, though, because we water from rain tanks, not our paid water service. One reason I have the ollas buried in the garden is to help even out some swings and keep moisture toward the roots, but I’m sure it’s not as good as a well run drip irrigation system. These particular sweet potatoes also got dug up several times by armadillos/possums/raccoons or whatever when they were first getting established. That probably set them back a bit.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

I've set up a 5-gallon bucket full of water on a folding chair before to keep steady moisture on a single plant. If you use aquarium type hose you can get a syphon effect going and pinch it off to a drip, using a clothespin at the tail end of the line or by poking toothpicks in it to partially obstruct the flow. Just tuck the entry side of the hose under the bail of the bucket, so it is not hindered and it will drip all day long.  If a larger hose is all you have, you can get the syphon going, then plug the downstream end with cotton to restrict it to a dribble.  It takes quite a bit of tweaking to get it just right and it's ugly as sin, but who cares if it works.

(To get the syphon started, just dip the entire length of tubing under water long enough to expel all the air, then  carefully raise one end out of the water while holding it watertight with your thumb.  Once the exit is lower than the source, the water will be pulled through the tubing by surface tension).

[macmex]

Constant moisture sure helps with high production! That's why I generally go with plastic mulch and drip tape. It is a lot of work to install, but the harvest is usually worth it.

Don' t worry if you don't have a cool place to store sweet potatoes. The best I've ever seen with storage was in the warmest part of our house. Avoid anything below 50 F. as that seems to encourage spoilage.

I'll be digging our sweets soon. Wish I could have already started. Just have't been able to see clear to start yet. Digging the sweet potatoes is probably the high point of my gardening year.

[heavyhitterokra]

This break in the weather and the rain we have coming tomorrow ought to make your sweet potato digging job a lot more enjoyable! I had planned on digging a few with the class yesterday, but it was 90 degrees by the time they got here and the rain hadn't shown up yet, so it was nasty hot and way too dry to be prodding the ground, looking for potatoes. It's beautiful out there today though ... Go figure.