Growing Sweet Potatoes

 The Conventional and Not-So-Conventional Way

🥔 Plant Talk | by Guy Saldiveri | March 2, 2026

Who doesn’t love a good sweet potato? I know I do. 

Baked, French fried, mashed, or baked into a pie. The pie… I almost like that even better than pumpkin pie—almost.

If you’ve never tried growing your own, I highly recommend it. They’re easy to start, easy to maintain, and extremely high-yielding.

Plus—and a lot of folks don’t know this—you can eat the leaves too.

Clearing up the big confusion

Let’s start this one off by getting rid of the elephant in the room—sweet potatoes are NOT yams. They look and taste different, and they belong to different families of plants.

Sweet potatoes are grown throughout the world. Yams, on the other hand, are generally grown in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

Sweet potatoes are root vegetables in the morning glory family. They have sweet, moist flesh and smooth, thin skins. Yams are large, starchy tubers with a rough, brown, bark‑like skin.

And honestly, unless you’ve been to an African or Asian country, you’ve probably never eaten a true yam—no matter what those cans you buy around Thanksgiving say.

How sweet potatoes actually get started

Sweet potatoes don’t grow from the potato itself the way Irish potatoes do. If you bury a dormant sweet potato whole, you’ll get vines—lots of them—but very few, if any, potatoes. I don’t know why that is, I just know that it is.

Sweet potatoes are grown from slips—the sprouts that pop out when a potato sits too long in the pantry. Most of my slips come from the “forgotten potatoes”—the ones you meant to eat but didn’t. In this case, procrastination pays off.

Two conventional ways to make slips

• Cut and root the sprouts. Place the slips in a glass of water. They’ll root in about a week. Once rooted, plant them like any other nursery start.
  
  
• Float the whole potato. Stick toothpicks around the middle, suspend it in a glass of water, and let it sit. Roots form on the bottom, slips grow from the top.

Quick note: sweet potatoes have a top and bottom. The blunt, fatter end is the top; the skinny, pointed end is the rooting end. It matters—roots form at the bottom, slips at the top.

Now, those are the ways most folks do it. But I’ve played with another method that’s a little off the beaten path.

The unconventional method

I take a small plastic container, fill it halfway with soil, and bury the potatoes halfway down. I keep the soil moist (not soggy) and let them sit for a few weeks. They’ll send out slips everywhere, and the potatoes themselves will root heavily.

One year I thought, “Why not?” and planted the whole mess—potatoes, roots, slips—into a large grow bag. I buried everything except the sprouts.

What happened? Exactly the same thing the conventional methods give you: long, edible vines and a fantastic harvest in about four months. The bonus? As the original potatoes broke down, they fed the plants.

I’m not sure why this isn’t listed as a recommended method, but I can tell you from experience: it works, and it works well.

Light maintenance for a heavy yielding crop

Sweet potatoes don’t need much, but a few small habits make a big difference:

• Give them room to run. The vines sprawl. Containers, raised beds, or open ground all work—just expect a takeover. I find setting them up on a trellis works the best—they don't have tendrils, so you will have to weave them.

• Don’t overwater. They like consistent moisture early on, but once established, they’re surprisingly drought tolerant.

• Feed lightly. Too much nitrogen = lots of vines, fewer potatoes. Compost or a balanced fertilizer is plenty.

• Lift wandering vines. If they root at the nodes, you’ll get lots of small potatoes instead of fewer large ones. Lifting the vines every couple of weeks keeps the energy focused.

• Harvest when the leaves start to yellow. Usually around the four-month mark. Cure the potatoes in a warm, humid place for a week or two to sweeten them up. This gets rid of the starchy flavor you will have if you leave out this step. It takes time for that starch to convert to sugar.

Wrapping it up

So next time you’re getting your garden ready—and looking at my watch, I can tell it’s almost spring—consider growing some sweet potatoes. Try the conventional way, or give the unconventional method a shot. It saves time, saves effort, and in my experience, produces the same harvest.

Let me know how it turns out for you.

Happy Gardening 🌱