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Mark Reed wrote:I start my sweet potato slips in trays of wet sand in an unheated cold frame in early to mid-May depending on the weather. I pluck the slips off when they are five or six inches long and plant immediately. I don't worry if they have roots or not, I just keep them well watered for a few days and they take right off.
I've wondered about productivity of sweet potatoes in warm climates as they are technically perennial. Here the bulk of growth is June to mid-September. This year June and early July were weirdly cool and cloudy, so they were slow to take off good, but I got a pretty good harvest despite that. They of course don't survive winter only growing in that three to four-month window but still, they are one of the easiest and most productive crops I've ever grown.
Have you grown peanuts? They also like a long warm season. I've never seen such numerous and large nitrogen nodules on any other plant, so they are great for that too.
Hi Mark, we don’t grow peanuts, since I a, very allergic to them. My oldest daughter and I have major food allergies due to a mast cell disorder, so there are things we don’t grow for that reason. Tomatoes are the only nightshade plant I grow, and I can’t eat them, but the rest of the family do. I don’t grow regular potatoes for the same reason. I can’t even touch a potato plant or a potato without breaking out in hives. It’s why we grow so many sweet potatoes and I process a lot of them, without curing since them. This way the tastes are less sweet, so they work better as a substitute.
As for the sweet potatoes, once the kids have left the next, the plan is to use one of the tall beds and grow the sweet potatoes as perennials, so we just harvest when we need them. That said, I use a lot of sweet potato starch cooking and each pound only produce 10-20% starch. What’s left from making starch, we feed to the chickens and ducks who loves it. It’s almost impossible finding organic sweet potato starch, and the regular kind are imported from China, so who knows what has been added to it. The starch are also very easy to make.
