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Old June 5, 2017   #43
Durgan
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: Brantford, ON, Canada
Posts: 1,341
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Sweet potatoes are related to morning glory, in the genus Ipomoea. Those vines go on forever. I found the vines never rooted and all the forming potatoes were in about a two foot diameter of the planted slip. Mind you growth is checked by frost in my relatively short season. I use last year's crop for new slips or if I find a particularly attractive supermarket potato, I grow slips from that.

This was my 2016 crop.

http://durgan.org/2016/September%202...0Harvest/HTML/ 15 September 2016 Sweet Potato Harvest
My ten sweet potato plants were harvested. This is my first attempt at growing sweet potatoes under reasonable conditions. Eight of the plants were from slips purchased from a site on the internet. Two purple ones were from slips from a supermarket grown by myself. The supermarket slips were longer growing hence accounts for their larger production. The total weight was 31.5 pounds from ten plants or an average of 3.15 pounds per plant. With good growing conditions extrapolating my results an expectation from each plant would be about 6 pounds in a home garden. All the new tubers were centered around the planted slip in a diameter of about 12 inches. The vegetation covered a very large area and was very healthy. It was removed before digging the tubers. Some of the tubers were disfigured by an insect or rodent. This was simply cut away. The tubers were placed in a hot greenhouse and will be allowed to cure or condition for about ten days, then stored in my root cellar. One tuber was baked and is shown with these pictures. It was most pleasant to eat.
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