#16. Growing Sweet Potatoes
Sweet potatoes are easy to grow in tropical and sub tropical climates, but the plants will also grow in cool climates. What you may end up being concerned with is how to stop the vines from taking over your garden. Be warned if you plan on growing sweet potatoes that it is a very invasive creeper.
Sweet potatoes or yams are a tender garden perennial, grown as an annual. The vegetable needs a really long gardening season – approximately 6 months. This is one vegetable that is not suited for container gardening and is totally useless as an indoor plant. It needs to be in the ground and under the sun.
You can insert a mature tuber in a jar of water, add a few pieces of charcoal to the jar and place the jar in a warm, sunny spot. Change the water now and then, till your tuber starts growing. Then transplant the tuber into your vegetable garden.
Sweet potatoes need warm days and nights, with a minimum of four months free of frost. The sweet potato can be quite difficult to grow in cooler climates.
Choose a sunny spot in your vegetable garden for the sweet potatoes. The soil should be sandy or sandy loam with a medium fertility level. The plant develops very deep roots, so you need to dig the garden beds really deep. In fact, the deeper the bed you prepare, the bigger the plant roots will be. You will need to constantly monitor weed growth as the sweet potato is weed intolerant.
If you live in an area that enjoys a hot climate, you can plant your sweet potato all year round. In warm climes planting is generally done from spring to mid-summer. As mentioned earlier in this article, the sweet potato is grown from sprouted tubers. Make hills of ten inches in height, spaced three feet apart in the garden bed. Plant the pieces in the hills and space plants out to a foot apart. Water your plants immediately after planting is finished.
Dig a complete fertilizer into the bed when preparing it for planting. This will eliminate the need to fertilize the bed a second time. Plants need to be watered well at the beginning of the growth cycle. Once the seedlings start to sprout, reduce the amount of watering, but the soil needs to be constantly moist. Avoid over watering because the roots will start to rot.