Sweet potatoes - slips, planting, harvesting and curing

I LOVE sweet potatoes! And I've grown them every year since we moved in, with tepid results. The slips always arrived stressed and in some cases dead, and my best efforts to revive them were less than what was required. So we decided to grow our own - from scratch.

Here's how we did this year.

In late February, we brought up the rest of our mediocre haul of sweet potatoes from the basement and put them on a seed heating mat on the kitchen windowsill. Here's what they looked like after a few weeks:

I changed the water every couple of days, and this is what they looked like a couple of weeks later:

The roots grew down and the slips grew up. Once the slips were about 12" long, I broke them off and put them in jars of clean water to root. Interestingly, because some of the slips started close to the water line, they already had vigorous roots. As with the sweet potatoes, I changed the water every couple of days, and by the time planting rolled around, we had about two dozen slips.

I wish I'd taken some pictures of the sweet potato vines taking over my garden, but I didn't. So beautiful! The leaves are a lovely shiny dark green.

I did, however, take a picture of our harvest:

Half a bushel - our best haul ever! And some of the biggest sweet potatoes we've ever grown, too.

Sweet potatoes are supposed to be left on the ground for 2-3 hours to begin curing, and then put in a warm, humid, dark environment (unwashed) for 7-14 days to cure properly. This heals up any cuts or scrapes on the sweet potatoes and thickens up the skin a little for better storage. This is also when the starches in the sweet potatoes are converted to sugar. Yummy!

This year, unwashed was out of the question. The sweet potatoes had to be harvested because we'd had a couple of good frosts and the leaves were dead. (If left too long, the potatoes can be damaged.) But we'd also had a lot of rain and the garden was muddy, muddy, muddy. So Mike took the hose to them and got the worst of the muck off before we put them to bed.

For curing, sweet potatoes prefer 75-85 F with high humidity. Not sure where we'd find that in our house at this time of year, but Mike had a brilliant idea. We put the sweet potatoes in two plastic crates, and put them on 3 seed heating mats with a bowl of water between them for humidity:

 We'd already checked, and the crates fit perfectly under our coffee table!

Cover with a nice heavy quilt, and voila, a micro-environment for sweet potato curing!

 After 2 days, the temperature was about 80 F, and I had to fill up the water bowl after 4 days, so looks like we've given them perfect curing conditions: hot, humid, and dark. We'll get back to you when it time to store them for the winter.