When to harvest sweet potatoes

[HiPoha]

I planted a couple of sweet potatoes in a half barrel container in early June. Used store bought potting soil and compost mix for the growing medium. The potatoes seem to be doing very well judging from the vines growing out of the container. There are vines coming out of the soil from places other than the seed potatoes, so I assume there are potatoes under them. It's been 5 months now. Should I harvest them now?

[Worth1]

It all depends on the cultivar, anywhere from 2 to 9 months.

In your climate the things will just keep spreading and never die.
I would do an exploratory dig and see what you have.

And leave some in the container so they will continue to grow.
You could have a perpetual sweet potato factory.


Worth

[HiPoha]

Hey Worth, I did dig to check. Looks like this sweet potato is taking it's time to grow. Not sure what variety it was, just something from the grocery store that I cut and planted. I am not going to waste time on this anymore. I'll pull them out and plant something else.

[Lee]

Could be the barrel restricted how much the roots could swell into potatoes....

Also, can you detail your planting method?
One good way to plant sweet potatoes from store bought is to place
one half suspended in water and let it root. Eventually it will sprout green leaf shoots from the sides/top of the air exposed part of the potato. Once these get 4~5" in length, you can pinch them off and
root those to plant. (These are typically called slips which is how they are normally sold commercially.)

You may know all of this, but it wasn't clear from your post that is how you planted.....

Lee

[Durgan]

My ex wife planted some sweet potato vines from a greenhouse supplier in two pots for the foliage about six years ago. When emptying the eight inch pots in the Fall, I noticed two large potatoes in each pot about fist size in the bottom. When baked, my wife said there were the best she had ever eaten , whatever that meant? The potatoes had no colour and were white. At first I was reluctant to eat them but fed a bit to my wife first and she lived so I tried them. I suspect one can eat any type of sweet potato.

[kath]

If the vines are allowed to root in places away from the mother plant, you will get many more tubers but they will all be greatly reduced in size compared with how large they would get if you prevent that rooting from happening. Not sure if this was a factor in the case of your plants.

kath

[HiPoha]

Hi again folks. From what I've read, growing sweet potatoes is not supposed to be difficult. Maybe easier than growing regular white potatoes. After digging up the whole container, I found about a dozen beautiful slivers of what could have been sweet potatoes. But it would have taken another 4 months or so till harvest. Soil seems to have been nice and loose for them to expand, even in the 25 gallon container. Time and garden space is something for me to consider wisely.

[Worth1]

Originally Posted by HiPoha

Hi again folks. From what I've read, growing sweet potatoes is not supposed to be difficult. Maybe easier than growing regular white potatoes. After digging up the whole container, I found about a dozen beautiful slivers of what could have been sweet potatoes. But it would have taken another 4 months or so till harvest. Soil seems to have been nice and loose for them to expand, even in the 25 gallon container. Time and garden space is something for me to consider wisely.

Good choice.
This is the reason I dont grow jalapenos.
Too cheap in the store.
I do have some wild ones come up though.

worth

[HiPoha]

It's been 7 months since I was here. What happened was I left some of the juvenile sweet potatoes in the 25 gallon half barrel and left it alone for all this time. I did notice the potatoes regrowing and putting out vines from the barrel. The other day I dug out the barrel and to my surprise had some good sweet potatoes. I microwaved a couple of them and they tasted very good. I think this variety was called the Satsuma.