How to grow sweet potatoes

Sweet potato is a warm season vine grown not from seed but from rooted stem cuttings called slips, which spread out to cover a bed the way a groundcover would, tolerating heat and poor soil better than most vegetables. Gardeners grow it for the enlarged storage roots that form underground through the season, and because the vine keeps growing until frost, timing the dig matters: Mississippi State University Extension recommends harvesting in late summer to early fall, before soil temperatures fall below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, since the roots keep sizing up until they are pulled.

The hardest part of growing sweet potato well comes after the harvest, not during it. Alabama Cooperative Extension explains that freshly dug roots need curing at 85 degrees Fahrenheit and high humidity for several days before storage, which heals harvest wounds, protects against storage disease, and converts starch to sugar for better flavor. A second year gardener who digs the roots and moves straight to eating or storing them, treating them like a table potato, skips this step entirely. The roots then hold far less time in storage, bruises turn to rot instead of healing over, and the sweetness the crop is prized for never fully develops.