Time to start Sweet Potato slips. You do not grow sweet potato from seed like most other plants. Sweet potato's are grown from sprouts of the sweet potato aka sweet potato slips. There are a few way to get your sweet potato to produce slips. The first way I'm going to show you is by immersing half of the sweet potato in a jar of water. Use tooth pic's to keep the sweet potato from falling in the jar.

Keep you sweet potato's in a warm sunny spot. We have a south facing bay window that works great for this. In about a week the sweet potato will start to put off roots in the water. The white "hairs" coming out of the potato in the picture above are roots beginning to forum.

The slips will grow out of the eyes of the potato. In this picture there is a slip starting to poke out of one of the potato eyes at the top left. One sweet potato can produce anywhere for 10 to 50 slips! It will take 4 to 6 weeks to be able to get harvestable slips.

The second way we start our slips is in soil... First put one to two inches of soil in a container. Use a container that drains well. If the sweet potato is completely covered in water for to long it will began to rot and you will not get any slips from it.

Lay the sweet potato on top of the soil. leave a few inches in between the potato's so they have room to shoot out there roots and not have competition.

Lightly cover the sweet potato's with another layer of soil. Make sure you don't cover them to much or compact the soil. The slips will have trouble coming up if the soil is compact or there is to much on top of them.

In 4 to 6 week I will bring y'all back to show you the next step. Which is getting the sweet potato slips to root. About a week after getting the slips to root we will be going over how to plant them in the ground.

Sweet potato's need about 120 days of temperatures over 85 degrees fahrenheit. It takes some planing and some time to completely grow your own sweet potato's. If you are interested in growing your own you should make a plan NOW and start to execute.

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