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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 4, 2022 9:16:35 GMT -6
macmex is giving me some guidance about trying to produce my own slips for my garden and for my neighbor’s garden. I wanted to post a thread here with my questions for him so that it could be of benefit to others. Last year most of my sweet potato growing space was dedicated to a variety that my mother gave me (originally given to her by my aunt). It grew for us but produced smaller sweet potatoes than I prefer, and my kids don’t really like the texture. I’m not sure if they were Ginseng or not, but that seems to be the best match. I did grow also grow a few slips that I raised from a grocery store potato next to them, and they did better, and my kids like them more. (It’s also what my neighbors grew from my extra slips and what they want to grow again.). I don’t know for a fact that it’s Beauregard, but it seems the most likely given the wide availability of that in stores and that all the characteristics match. Because I didn’t grow very many, I only have a handful of potatoes of that variety in my pantry. (I’ve got tons of small Ginsengs, if that’s what they are, and they are sprouting all over the place. The problem is that I don’t want to grow them again because I need to concentrate my small area on what my kids like the most.) Some of those few Beauregard (?) potatoes have started to sprout. It’s really far too early, even for down here, to think about putting potatoes in the ground. (It’s 22 degrees while I’m typing this.). I’d love to keep these sprouts going, though. What options do I have? I could bed the whole potato in the little terra cotta planter than I used last year to grow slips. It fits nicely on a heat mat. Here’s where my problem comes. I want to feed those nice big tubers to my children this spring. (I want to have my cake and eat it, too—have my slips and eat the potato, too.) Last year I had one mother sweet potato that produced three different batches of slips for me (the reason my neighbors were able to fill up a vacant bed with them), and we did still eat the mother sweet potato when it got too late in the year for me to think about planting. It was decent. Do I have other options? Break off the slips and plant them in my little planter on a heat mat? Cut off the sprouting end and bed it in the planter? If I do cut off the sprouting end, will the cut cure just as my chewed potatoes did in the fall, or would I need to plan to cook the potato right away? Right now I’m just leaving the sweet potatoes in the pantry, but I wanted to start thinking about how I might do this. I know for folks who grow hundreds of potatoes it’s not a big deal to use up nice potatoes for slips. It’s just that I have so few potatoes of this variety this year (I grew a four foot row to put it in perspective), and I would like to eat some of the larger ones. (For some reason it’s the larger ones that have sprouted, and the smaller ones haven’t.). Next year I have hopes to grow closer to 40 square feet of them instead of eight square feet, so I’m excited about that, but I’ll need slips. I hope this makes sense. I’d love ideas about what I should do, and if it comes to just using my potatoes for slips and not eating them, that’s what I’ll do. I’m more interested in getting established with sweet potatoes long term than in having one or two yummy meals, but if I can do both, I’ll jump at that chance. I’d be grateful to hear of anyone’s advice or experience with growing slips from partial potatoes or just breaking them off and planting them. If those aren’t good options, I’d love to know in advance not to try it.
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Post by macmex on Feb 4, 2022 11:43:13 GMT -6
It's very common that sweet potatoes sprout about this time of year. In fact, I might worry if they didn't. Variety affects how much they sprout. I know some varieties which are already sprouting the day I dig them at harvest time. Others wait a few months before they start. Sandhill Preservation Center has descriptions of sweet potato varieties which are very slow to sprout and therefore more difficult to propagate.
So, what does one do about this? Well, if you really need a lot of slips in the spring, you could start the sweet potato by bedding it in a pot or standing it in a glass of water (always in a warm place). This will prompt a lot more growth. It's also possible to twist or cut off the sprouts and root them to hold until spring. If you do, I'd recommend that you strip off most of the roots at planting time. Knotted roots make for gnarled sweet potatoes.
But if you're not in need of anything mentioned above, you can simply ignore the sprouts. They may develop a bit more, but the root should remain quite viable for many months to come. Here's a picture I took yesterday of some of the roots I've set aside for "seed" (meaning for starting slips).
Notice they've even developed green leaves! Yet they are not growing very fast. They'll be fine until March when I bed them. In your case, being near San Antonio, I suspect you will want to bed your sweets later this month or sometime in February. It warms up more rapidly there.
This is a picture of roots which I had stored for a solid year, in a closed cardboard box. They were still usable for food and, obviously, they would have worked for starting slips
I currently have some Becca's Purple roots in my storage area which are from the 2020 harvest. They look a lot like the above picture and I'm just leaving them to see if they'll still work for slips, this coming March. I suspect they will.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 4, 2022 12:40:23 GMT -6
Nice pictures, George! Thanks for posting that.
If a person only has a small area for starting slips, (say a south facing kitchen window) you can suspend a sweet potato inside a wide-mouth quart jar by poking toothpicks in it and letting the bottom half of the potato stay submerged under water. The slips get their energy from the sugars stored inside the sweet potato, so they need no supplement other than plenty of water.
I've grown them that way in years past, just as greenery in winter by placing a leftover Thanksgiving sweet potato into a quart jar in early December. By May, I'd have vines that reached to the top of the window, at which point I'd set the whole thing out in my garden, which at the time was only a hole dug in my backyard. I got over twenty pounds of sweet potatoes from a single planting my first year here by planting a whole potato that way. (At the time, I didn't know about slips, I just planted the whole thing in one hole).
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 4, 2022 20:52:55 GMT -6
Thanks so much for the replies and suggestions. I do hope to get a good number of slips this year, but it’s still probably small (sweet) potatoes compared to what you plant up there in real row gardening. I have hopes to do a forty square foot bed, which is a lot more space than I’ve given them before. I do probably need to bed them later this month. I want to wait until we’re more consistently warm outside even though I plan to keep them inside in a (relatively) climate-controlled room.
I went outside to check my rain gauge late this afternoon (1/2 inch of precipitation—hurray!) after most of the ice had melted off the deck. I keep the gauge in the little terra cotta planter where I bedded my mother sweet potatoes last year. I thought while I was emptying the gauge that I’d just go ahead and bring the planter inside so that it could warm up well in advance of my needing it. Nope, it was still frozen solid to our deck, and I didn’t want to use much force and break it. It wasn’t as if I needed it inside. It was just one small step I could take to get reading for my gardening, and I suppose that I’m beginning to get a little gardening fever at this time of year.
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Post by macmex on Feb 5, 2022 5:24:30 GMT -6
Me too, though with firewood needs, I can hardly do any garden stuff. Still, I need to re-inventory my sweet potato roots, making sure I have set plenty aside plenty of roots for starting all varieties. I'm suspecting I may get hit with a tidal wave of sweet potato orders this year. I have at least two experimental sweet potato varieties to trial (raised from true seed a year ago) and I've acquired at least four new varieties from other sources. So I'm probably going to plant 270' of sweet potatoes this year, a 33% increase over last year, which was my largest planting ever.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 6, 2022 13:55:25 GMT -6
We’ve been processing a lot of firewood around here, too. I enjoy it, but it can be pretty exhausting. My husband and I cut down a dead oak tree beside our driveway yesterday. It wasn’t very tall (our live oaks tend to be wider than they are tall), but it had a pretty big (30 inch?) trunk at the based. My husband bucked the stump into two rounds and rolled them into the wheelbarrow. I took one round at a time to our barn where we process wood, and boy, I felt it last night. I’m very glad that tree is down, though, as it was beginning to rot inside in both of its trunks. I succeeded yesterday afternoon in bringing my little terra cotta planter inside (it waas still frozen to the deck at noon but melted by 5:00). I got it from a master gardener neighbor who moved away a couple of years ago, and I got all sorts of lovely pots and planters from her. This one is about 6“ by 12”, and I bedded two sweet potatoes in it last year (only one of which produced slips, but, boy, it kept producing). I was thinking of rooting my already growing sprouts in here now that we have sunshine coming through our windows again. I do have a question about soil, though. I need to replenish the growing medium and at the moment I’m out of finished compost or potting soil. I’d prefer not to buy anything at the moment, but I do have a partially used bag of peat moss in my garage (leftover from the last time we potted a blueberry). Would mixing in peat with the soil already in the container be a suitable medium, do you think?
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Post by macmex on Feb 6, 2022 15:32:08 GMT -6
That would probably work. The peat would be "warm," which is my main consideration. Something that doesn't insulate would probably make for "cold roots" and poor sprouting. A couple years ago I used cheap "garden soil" from a sack, purchased at a box store. Lost half my roots that year because 1) I think it didn't insulate well, and 2) drainage was atrocious. Part of the tray would be too dry and part would be too wet.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 6, 2022 18:25:52 GMT -6
Thanks, macmex. I admit that I was thinking about things like pH and drainage, but it never occurred to me to think about insulation quality. It makes sense though. I have a heat mat that I can put under the planter before I start. I’m not ready to begin quite yet. I’m just getting my thinking organized, but the more I organize my thinking, the more impatient I am to start..
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 22, 2022 20:55:17 GMT -6
Well, it was already warm this morning after a hot day yesterday. I figured that one of the big planters on my deck would have warm dry soil, so it would be a good day to bed some sweet potatoes and move it inside before the cold front moves in tonight (I even heard there was a possibility of ice in Hill Country, but I’m not sure if that applies to my area or not). I took the Beauregards out of my pantry. If they were large with just a few sprouts, I cut a chunk off and buried it. If they were small, I put in the whole thing. After they were planted, my husband helped me carry it inside, and then I gave it a nice watering with room temperature water. Here’s a photo as the sun was getting around to the back of the house where it comes in the windows. The room where I keep my plants is next to the family room with our stove, so it’s one of the warmer areas in the house if it’s cold outside. The windows are primary west with one to the south (where the sun is coming in the photo below), so it also gets quite warm when it’s sunny and the stove’s not burning. The sweet potatoes should like it. I think I counted 37 slips already sprouted, and I’m hoping to get a bunch more so that I can plant a larger bed (but still small compared to you all, I’m sure) this year and have enough to share with my neighbors. They did buy some grocery store potatoes and are planning to try to start some slips in their sunroom once the weather warms a bit more consistently.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 23, 2022 9:22:31 GMT -6
Well, it’s down to freezing this morning and is supposed to remain cloudy and cold (maybe just cool, but it seems cold to us and probably to sweet potatoes, too), so I’m glad we brought the planter in before the soil got chilled again. I measured the temperature in the planter this morning, and it was 75. I have lit the woodstove, and it will be burning the next couple of days, I expect. I’ll do my best to keep things warm.
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Post by macmex on Feb 23, 2022 10:42:07 GMT -6
Sounds like you're doing everything right! That's a great start! The only sweet potatoes I have going at this point are ones that I thought I'd lose in storage if I didn't plant right away. In about a month I'll be starting my slips.
Oh, I did start some sweet potato seeds the other day.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 23, 2022 14:13:22 GMT -6
Thanks for the encouragement, macmex. I sure hope these do well. I’d love to have a good crop of these, and my neighbors are really excited about growing sweet potatoes this year, too. Last year was the first year they’d ever done it, and they loved the whole experience. I hope they’ll be able to get some of their own slips this year, too, because I think they’d find it really rewarding to take the whole process from beginning to end. My five year old is sitting beside me on the loveseat doing his math. He had an exercise about using AM and PM in time, and he likes to make drawings on his papers. Today it was a sun and a moon having lunch. I asked him what they were eating, and he said, “Sweet potatoes!” I just had to share his little picture.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 23, 2022 20:50:03 GMT -6
That was a cool drawing and a wonderful comment about sweet potatoes. I enjoyed that.
The photo of a digital watch above reminded me of how little exposure kids nowadays have to real clock faces. When I was a kid, time was never depicted by digital wrist watches, (they were not yet invented). So I never gave it a second thought that kids nowadays might not know how to tell time by a traditional clock face, because that was all I grew up with. Digital watches didn't come along until the astronaut era in the mid-1960s. I think it was about 1972 before digital watches became available to the public.
Back while I was still teaching school, I had the seniors perform a public service by making clock faces for the elementary school out of Styrofoam plates with black poster board hands. The hands were attached to the center of each plate by a brass brad. Then, I had them number the clock faces with a magic marker.
While doing that, I was explaining to them how we'd incorporate a math lesson into clock faces for the younger students while counting by fives ... 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, and so on, until they had counted to 60, and that's how we'd teach the younger students how to tell time.
About that same instant, one of the girls in my class started sobbing. When I pulled her aside to ask what was wrong, I found out she didn't know how to tell time by reading a clock face. All her life there had been digital clocks that plainly stated what time it was with glowing numbers like 5:47, 12:23, 1:55, and so on. No one had ever taken time to teach her how to read an old fashioned clock face by the imaginary numbers that we all have in our heads. By the time she reached the higher grades; she was too embarrassed to ask anyone how to do it and had made it all the way to the 12th grade without ever knowing how to tell time by reading a traditional 12 numeral clock face.
Sometimes, we as adults just take things like that for granted ... Who knew? After that, I spent quite a bit of time that day going over the minutes from 1 to 60, making sure everyone in the class could tell time when the hands were between 5 minute marks. That day was one of the most rewarding of all the years I taught High School.
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Post by macmex on Feb 24, 2022 7:00:29 GMT -6
It's interesting how even gifted people often have an area of weakness which causes shame, and just how much of an impact it makes on them when they find someone who knows... and still respects/loves them.
Rachel, you're in a wonderful stage of life with your kids and it's great that they get to participate in your garden projects. It's also heart warming to hear of how your neighbors are growing in their ability and vision for growing sweet potatoes. I'd like to see many many more people get off the ground with this crop, as it has such a tremendous potential to provide a staple crop (crop which can sustain a person).
I'd like to mention two more things, both of which I was forgetting. First, though I haven't done the experiment to prove it, I suspect you'll do slightly better with slips if you leave the growing ends attached to the roots. My reasoning is that they draw sustenance from the root. I believe you'll get more slips and more vigorous growth if you do this in the future but fortunately, you'll do fine the way you've done it. This is just a suggestion.
Secondly, it would be really good if we did something to preserve that other, handed down variety, you have. Maybe you could send some slips or roots to Sandhill Preservation Center ( because Glenn Drowns has more time on his hands than do I). I know he'd grow it out and that he'd be the best possible person to evaluate their identity. If not him, I'd try to do it. I'm kind of overwhelmed, though, as I am dealing with upcoming surgery (next week) and already have a number of new batches of sweet potatoes to trial. I feel like the sweet potato venture, here, is about to take flight and yet... I may not be able to keep up; all the more reason to get MORE people growing and preserving them!
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Post by chrysanthemum on Feb 24, 2022 8:28:27 GMT -6
heavyhitterokra, that is a touching story from your teaching years. I’ve taught from 3rd grade up through college (Latin), and it was exhausting and rewarding. The issue I saw with students in the later years was that they had no longer been taught cursive writing. I’m making sure that my youngsters learn to read and write in both print and cursive. Just the other day I had a beautiful experience related to the clock. I have been teaching my youngest how to read the analog clock face. With the older ones we had a wooden puzzle to use to help, but that has broken over the years. We have three analog clocks in our house, but one has Roman numerals instead of numbers, another has birds instead of numbers, and the the only one with numbers sets itself automatically with atomic signals and can’t be adjusted manually. Last week I had a meeting for my kids’ community orchestra to help prepare for a big fundraiser. (It’s a wonderful group that charges them no tuition and gives them scholarships for their music lessons—amazing! I think it’s the only tuition-free orchestra group in the country.). I was in the town of Kerrville, Texas, which is a fair drive away from my location, and I passed a clock shop while I was driving. On my way home I stopped in and asked the owner if he had anything in his trash or on his workbench that I could use as a hands-on tool to help my five year old. He went to his back room and found an old electric clock with numbers and an easy-to-turn winding on the back and gave it to me free of charge since he was so delighted that someone was teaching kids to read a clock. I felt very blessed by his generosity, and my son has been delighted with using it and really learning fast.
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