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Plant of the Week
Sweet Potato, Yam
Latin: Ipomoea batatas
Our Thanksgiving tables offer an interesting mixture of
foods and present a culinary snapshot of American history that harkens
back to the first days of European settlement.
Everything from corn pudding to cranberries and sweet potato casserole
has an historic footnote to the history of our nation. It is appropriate
that the sweet potato, a fall-harvested crop, should have its place at
our holiday table.
The sweet potato is a tropical perennial vine of the morning glory
family that was cultivated by native tribes throughout the Caribbean
basin well before Columbus arrived. On his first trip, he was offered
roasted sweet potatoes. The edible portion of the sweet potato is a
swollen root used for starchy storage that can attain considerable size.
Being tropical in nature, sweet potatoes are sensitive to cold weather
and will break down internally if exposed to temperatures below 55
degrees F.
On his second trip, Columbus returned to the Americas with a fleet of 17
ships and1,500 men. He established the first town in the Americas,
Isabella in the modern day Dominican Republic. He returned to Spain with
a number of unhappy Indians, 60 parrots, three gold nuggets and roots of
the sweet potato.
Sweet potatoes quickly spread around the tropical regions of the world
and became a staple in many countries. The red and orange fleshed types
are an excellent food source rich in beta carotene, the precursor to
vitamin A. Henry VIII (1491-1547), obviously a connoisseur of fine foods
if his portraits are any indication, liked his sweet potatoes baked into
pies.
A surviving recipe from that era calls for sweet potatoes to be combined
with quinces, dates, egg yolks, sugar, rose water, spices, a quart of
wine and brains of three or four cock sparrows for added zest. To my
untrained and always appreciative taste buds, the sweet potato pies I
have eaten in Little Rock taste much like pumpkin pie but with a sweeter
after-taste.
Throughout the South, sweet potatoes are often called yams, especially
the moist, orange-fleshed types. This apparently is a corruption of an
African word "nyam" that African slaves used to describe the sweet
potato that became a staple of their diet on Southern plantations. In
Africa, a common food was a tuberous root belonging to the genus
Dioscorea
to which they applied this name.
Sweet potato was an ideal food for plantation owners because the roots,
provided they were stored correctly, could be kept for six to eight
months.
Sweet potatoes can be grown in the home garden with slips planted only
after the soil has thoroughly warmed in the spring.
Slips are vegetative shoots that are harvested from stored roots that
are forced into growth in the spring as temperatures begin rising. These
slips are 8 inches to10 inches long and contain no roots at planting,
but quickly root once planted in moist soil.
Sandy soils produce the highest quality sweet potatoes. A 10-foot row of
plants, with plants spaced about a foot apart, will yield up to 15
pounds of roots. Depending on the cultivar planted, plants mature in 90
to 110 days from planting.
The ornamental sweet potato vines we see in gardens produce an edible
taproot that is often softball size or larger. Unfortunately, the root
is white fleshed so it would make an anemic sweet potato casserole.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired
Extension Horticulturist
- Ornamentals
Extension News -
November 17, 2000
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