If I had to grow food to survive, the first thing I’d plant would be sweet potatoes.
Many vegetables have to be coaxed along. Stake, prune, fertilize, water, spray for this and that. Offer soft words of encouragement. Check for ripeness. Pick daily when in season. Even then, it’s a gamble as to what you’ll get, if anything.
Sweet potatoes, by contrast, are food that can fend for itself. You have to beat them back periodically, or they’ll take over. Other than that, plant in the spring, dig in the fall, and see what you got.
This year I went the extra mile and used the “aerial vines” technique, for a half-dozen plants tucked into a few square feet at the back of the garden. I had no room to let them sprawl, so I picked up the vines and draped them over a bar hung over the bed. The keeps the vines from taking over and forces them to put all their energy into a few big sweet potatoes, in a known location, instead of a larger number of smaller sweet potatoes, spread willy-nilly, wherever the vines decided to put down secondary roots. (I copied this from a YouTube gardener, but I can’t seem to locate that video now.)
Not sure if you can see what’s going on, but the sweet potato vines are hung over a pole, and down the front of the raised bed.
That mostly seems to have worked.
In prior years, seems like about half of what I pulled up was small, thin sweet potatoes. You can eat those, but they are a pain to use. Like this, from last year:
By contrast, this year, I’d say 85% of the weight of what I harvested is in a small number of large sweet potatoes. with just a few of the little thin ones on the side. That’s exactly what I was after. Like this, from this year:
That’s enough of an improvement in that this is going to be my preferred method from now on. It’s neater, more compact, and gives me a more usable harvest. No idea of the impact on total productivity.
Curing
My sweet potatoes turned out well enough this year that I’m going to try curing them properly. Just above, you see my setup for curing them.
You do not have to go to great lengths to cure them. In the past, I just set them aside, protected from the cold, in a paper bag. I ended up with edible sweet potatoes that kept through the winter.
Key word there is “edible”.
Per the experts, you get a sweeter and tastier product if you cure them properly. This means keeping them warm (~ 85F) and humid (~90% relative humidity) for a week or so. You need to do that just after you dig them up. Experts say this this encourages the conversion of some of the starch to sugar, and lets the sweet potatoes “heal over” minor wounds.
A real farmer would have a room set up to provide those conditions. But if you have the materials on hand, it takes about five minutes to set up a curing box for a small batch of sweet potatoes. As I did it, it takes:
- A cooler
- A 20-watt seed-starting mat.
- A bread pan full of water.
- A plastic tote to hold the sweet potatoes
- Optionally, a computer fan to circulate air.
I piled that stuff inside a cooler in the obvious fashion, and I’m letting it run for a week. I added a thermometer/hygrometer to check the conditions on the inside of the cooler, but it’s probably sufficient just to check that the inside of the cooler feels warm.
Conclusion.
Some things, I grow because I typically can’t get them at the grocery store (e.g., figs and black raspberries). Others, I grow because home-grown tastes better or is generally better quality (e.g, okra). Still others I grow because I want a big surplus for pickling/canning (cucumbers, when possible).
My home-grown sweet potatoes are none-of-the-above. They’re absolutely identical to store-bought. They should be, because I start them in the spring from store-bought sweet potatoes. And I don’t grow a lot of them because we don’t eat a lot of them.
So why grow them at all?
I grow sweet potatoes mostly because they are such a low-effort food. Buy a sweet potato at the store, bury it halfway in potting mix, water it and wait for sprouts. Pick the sprouts off and plant them. Water those for a week or so, until they set roots.
Leave them alone until its time to dig them up. Then, optionally, cure them. Minimal expense, minimal effort, and you can eat them when you’re done. It’s the ultimate in low-effort food gardening.
