Start Planning your Thanksgiving Meal now by Planting your own Sweet Potatoes

A staple of the southern fall diet is the yummy and nutritious sweet potato. Luckily for us growing sweet potatoes is all too easy here in the South. To harvest the tubers we are accustomed to, we usually plant the vines, called slips, during summer around May, June, or July and let them grow all summer for an early fall harvest. Here’s a bonus for growing your own: You can also harvest leaves as the roots grow, as they are abundant and are a great source of nutrition! You can toss the leaves in with other salad greens or sauté them like spinach for a new summer green.

Sweet Potatoes or Yams?

Sweet potatoes are actually a part of the morning glory family, so enjoy the lovely purple flowers and beautiful, vigorous vines while you wait for your sweet fall treat. Now for the age old debate, are yams and sweet potatoes one in the same? The answer is, “No.” While sweet potatoes are part of the morning glory family, yams are closely related to lilies and grasses. Yams have brown skins with white flesh, are native to Africa and Asia, and vary in size from about ¼ pound to over 100 pounds. There are over 600 varieties of yams and 95% of these crops are grown in Africa. Compared to sweet potatoes, yams are starchier, drier, and less nutritious. Sweet potatoes on the other hand range from white to yellow, red, purple or brown. The flesh also ranges in color from white to yellow, orange, purple, or orange-red. They are what we are familiar with eating. The true yam is not commonly found in the North American market.

Growing Sweet Potatoes

Now that that’s settled, let’s learn to grow our own sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are grown from plantlets called slips. I rarely see the slips/plants in any nursery, but it’s easy to grow your own. To get slips, simply purchase an organic sweet potato, sit it in the pantry and wait for vines to start growing. Snap these vines off and place them in water on a sunny window to begin rooting. Roots will form in just a few days. After the roots reach several inches or so, plant them in a pot or in the ground.

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