Sweet potatoes

[Arriga]

I planted 6 slips a month ago and now realized that I should have planted them in hills. What will happen since I didn't do this and is there a way to fix it. Thanks in advance.

[garden5]

You might be thinking of regular potatoes. With these, you mound up soil around the greens as they grow and this will cause more potatoes to grow.

Sweet potatoes are a little different. They have a vineing habit and will try to root in spots where the vine touches the soil. Some large growers prefer to lay down black plastic so that they can control where the vine touches and tries to produce potatoes. Personally, I don't think you should worry too much about not having them in mounds.

[url=https://www.urbanext.illinois.edu/veggies/sweetpotato.com]Here[/url] is a good article.

Good luck.

[sassyjvg]

I also have sweet potatoes which I started in a mound, but now there is no evidence of that(the bed is flat as a pancake). The vine is spreading like wildfire and I can't wait to see the end results! BTW when I put them in the ground, the tricky St. Louis weather flip flopped back into a cold strain but time and climbing temperatures gave the plant a second chance.

[Gary350]

Last year I plants sweet potatoes about the first week of July from 4 potatoes in the pantry that were sprouting. I cut off the sprout end and planted it about 2" deep. They all grew and I kept the vines growing in circles around the plant. Vines did not try to sprout and grow roots. The ground got all humped up and the potatoes exposted them self so I had to cover them up with dirt 3 times between July and October when I harvested the potatoes. I got about 20 very large sweet potatoes from 4 plants growing in very dry poor sandy soil in full sun.

This year I have planted 3 sweet potatoes sprouts. This time I put the potatoe ends that I cut off of the potato directly on the soil surface and covered them over with compost. So far so good.

About 30 years ago I planted about 10 sweet potato plants in some very hard dry clay soil at the other house. They did fine, much better than I had expected. This was my first attempt at growing sweet potatoes and they did great.

I think your sweet potatoes will be fine sweet potatoes don't seem to care if the soil is hard or poor soil. They seem to like it very HOT and dry much dryer than most plants and full sun.

I would put sweet potatoes in the same catagory as Okra and Blackberries. The plants do not seem to care if the soil is poor, hard or extremely dry. The hotter it gets the better they seem to like it.

[engineeredgarden]

I grow sweet potatoes in containers each year with great results. They really are very forgiving...

EG

[gixxerific]

I grow sweet potatoes in containers each year with great results. They really are very forgiving...

EG

Now I have something to do with my extra sprouts that seem to keep coming.

Thanks for the idea, don't know why I didn't think about it since I had regular potatoes n buckets.