Growing Sweet Potatoes

You love sweet potatoes and you want to plant and grow them in your vegetable garden. When gardening, the thoughts of what to plant, the days from planting to maturity or picking the vegetables are vitally important. Planting and growing sweet potatoes is not hard, doing it organically might give you a challenge.
Growing sweet potatoes will take some preparation and thought but once you have them planted they take little work, however, they do take 90-120 days to maturity and harvest time depending on the variety you choose to plant. Therefore, although you will need to purchase a potato (spade) fork, you will not be using it immediately.

Varieties of Sweet Potatoes:

• Growing sweet potatoes such as Georgia Jet, a vining type, has a 90-day maturity time and recommended for the northern states but also do well in the south.
• Vardaman, a bush type sweet potato, has a 100-day maturity time also does well in the northern states.
• Centennial has a 90-day maturity time, according to Vermont Bean Seed Company, “the most popular variety in the U.S. today. Always very sweet and tender”
• Beauregard has a 100-day maturity
• Porto Rico 110-day maturity
• Old time favorite Nancy Halls has 120-day maturity

  

Sweet potato grown in our organic garden

Growing sweet potatoes is subject to your climate and weather. Do your homework and choose the variety of tubers that suits your needs.

Growing sweet potatoes will require no fertilizer and will grow in just about any soil anywhere. The only real concern would be planting them in the mound system so they get plenty of drainage.

If you are limited on garden space, try growing sweet potatoes in containers such as an old bushel basket, flowerpots or buckets.

You can purchase your sweet potato plants from you local nurseries or if you start early enough you can order you plants from one of the many catalog companies.

After chance of frost is past in your area, make your mounding row and or rows and start planting your sweet potatoes 18 inches apart.

Depending on the variety of sweet potatoes you chose to plant, you will soon be using that potato fork, you purchased, to dig them up. See growing sweet potatoes is not hard at all.