Sweet potato slips the easy way

I didn't come up with this method, I learned it watching David the good on YouTube. I've tried growing a few different ways, but this is in my opinion hands down the easiest way.
You plant the sweet potato in a shallow pot. Cover it with a thin layer of potting soil(mine were covered, but over time the soil washed away from the top). Water and wait. Before you know it, the vines will pop up. What makes this way superior to  the other methods I've tried is when you remove the slip from the potato it already has roots. No need to put it in water, you can just plant the slip where you want it to grow.
The first one I did only had a few roots, so it wilted a lot the first day, but I watered it, and it looked great the next morning, and has done well since.
I'm super late. I should have planted these a month ago at least. I may not get much out of it, but I have a long growing season, so I might as well give it a try.
I just wanted to share this. It's always good to be able to skip right to planting.

I do mine this way pretty much every year.  I pot mine up around April 1 and put the pots in a warm place inside while they slowly think about growing.  Often I can get 2 or 3 batches of slips from the same "seed" potatoes....small nice whole potatoes that I set aside from the harvest to keep for planting.  There are some varieties, though, that simply do not want to sprout, and sometimes they are inconsistent from year to year.  If I must have these, I also keep some vines growing in a hanging pot over the winter of them, and then clip these up into cuttings in the spring.  I think I've weeded out the last of those varieties by now though.

OK, what is the 'slip'?

John C Daley wrote:OK, what is the 'slip'?

   Slips are sprouts grown from sweet potatoes, which are then used to grow new sweet potatoes.  
   I learned today that sweet potatoes belong to the Convolvulaceae  (morning glory) family and potatoes are from the Solanaceae (nightshade) family.  Also, potatoes are tubers and sweet potatoes are roots.  I never really thought about it before; I just always assumed they were both tubers and/or were in the same family.

   

Jen, I'm curious how you grow sweet potatoes in your climate. Are you growing them for greens or for tubers? Either way, how does this affect when you plant and how long to harvest? With a similarly long growing season I'm always at a loss about when to plant them for tubers. I like to have the leaves during the hottest part of the summer, when the rest of our greens are mostly gone, and generally have a few growing in pots just for this purpose. I'll often find "incidental tubers" but generally I buy them since sweet potatoes are so cheap here and I have rocky clay soil in limited space.
This year though I was thinking about maybe doing a few barrels planted with some funky types... I just had to cut down a passionfruit that shaded my front yard and I need some fast-growing climbing foliage-- maybe a perfect opportunity to solve two problems at the same time.

We produce slips in a similar way but use vermiculite instead of soil. In the fall when we select out the roots for propagation, we store them in a tray/container of vermiculite. In the spring (mid April here in Zone 4) we bring the container into indirect light and start watering it. When the slips form we cut them from the mother root and put each into a quart pot of potting soil. The slips get a little bit leggy with reduced light but that makes it easier to plant them quite deep so more roots will form around the stem. It takes about a week to ease their transition into full light. We plant them out around June 1st here in hills under Remay, if the weather cooperates.

So how is a ' slip' produced please>?

John C Daley wrote:So how is a ' slip' produced please>?

Larisa has explained her method of producing slips using vermiculite in the preceding post to yours.

The tubers can also be buried in sand.

Often, the slips will sprout naturally if a sweet potato is just left in the pantry for too long. Once the shoots are a few inches long, they can be placed in water to form roots.

In NZ we call them kumara.

Here is an article about growing them

https://koanga.org.nz/grow-great-kumara/

To produce slips I buy an organic sweet potato, or you can buy a a sweet potato from a seed co. Or nursery.
I use the method of putting the sweet potato in a shallow pot, and covering it with a little soil. Once it has grown shoots with leaves you can literally pull it off of the sweet potato and you have a little sweet potato seedling which is what I called a slip.
There are lots of other ways to make sweet potato slips, I just like this method because I can skip the step needle to get the slip to grow roots, because it already has them.