Annuals - Ornamental Potatoes
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 (April) Last fall, I harvested two large tubers from my ornamental sweet potato vine. They are beginning to sprout now. Please tell me how to plant them.

 Edible sweet potato plants are grown from slips, which are produced from the sweet potato saved from the year before. While the ornamental plants also can produce some large fruits -- and many did last year, they don't always breed true. I have had some gardeners tell me that the resulting plants were all green the following season, while others have gotten something similar to the Margarita or black-foliaged version of the year before. Since you have them, give it a try and see what results you get. You won't be out anything but your time. To grow your own plants, place the sweet potato roots about one inch apart in a hotbed and cover with two inches of sand or light soil. Add another one inch of sand when the shoots begin to appear. Keep the soil in the bed moist throughout the sprouting period, but never allow it to become waterlogged. Keep soil temperature between 70 degrees and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Plants are ready to pull in about 6 weeks (when they are rooted and 6 to 8 inches tall)

 (July) Last fall, my ornamental Sweet Potatoes formed large tubers. If that happens again, how shall I store them and next Spring, what planting procedure should I use?

  While the ornamental sweet potatoes can form fairly large potatoes, they are not a great edible quality. Those that have tried storing them and replanted, have found that most of them have been coming back mainly as green plants, reverting to earlier parentage. If you want to try it yourself, after harvesting, simply store them in a cool, dry place (once you have made sure they are free of blemishes) and then resprout in the spring, after all chances of frost are passed. We can probably all remember our grandmothers with a jar of water with a sprouted sweet potato in it--you could always do that.

 (November) While pulling up my ornamental sweet potato vines, I noticed two big hard lumps under the soil. To my surprise, it was two large sweet potatoes! Are they edible?

  Yes, they are edible. This has been a great growing season, so you are not alone in your "sweet potato" production. The ornamental sweet potato vines were discovered during research from an edible sweet potato trial selection, so they are edible, but the overall quality is not what you would expect from the varieties chosen for consumption. That is why they were chosen for their foliage as an ornamental, versus one produced for consumption. At one point we were saving the sweet potatoes to start new plants the following spring, but the resulting plants turned out to be green, not the black or chartreuse ones they started out with.

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