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 The Pitchfork’s survival projects,

Survival Sweet Seed Potatoes and Sweet Potato Slips

Pitchfork © 2010
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Freely quote with attribution

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INTRODUCTION

For the longest time, Pitchfork couldn't get his right-away reckon growing sweet potato 'slips'.  Slip what?  Slit how?  Slip when?

So Pitchfork got himself a couple of 'organic' sweet potatoes from Publix, named them 'organic sweet seed potatoes' (that's what happens to a sweet potato that gets used to make more sweet potatoes, and he opted for organic, figuring they would be least likely spuds to have been treated against sprouting or at least easily sprouting and are likely heirloom), and straight away set 'em down in water.  Just plopped 'em in a bowlful.

They float.  So setting them 'down' means about half gets wet and half stays dry.

Kept the water topped up.  Kept the bowl with natural light on it, but not in the direct sun.

In time to follow, starting in a week or two, 4 different growing-from-the-sweet-potato-seed-potato happened.

1. Roots grew without stems

2. Stems grew without roots, right out of the potato, notably, that portion of each sweet potato that was above the waterline 

3. Stems grew with roots, but slowly

4. Stems grew with roots, quickly - underwater, the stems were white at first, turning green when they got of size and even leafing out a little before surfacing

Here are all 4 going on at once.  Looking hard, you can see 1, 2, and 4.  3. is hidden from view.  Be cool, it's coming up.

Pitchfork's read that the stem without roots can be planted once a piece of the potato at the stem's base is cut out still attached to the stem.  He hasn't gotten that for yet.

Pitchfork waited for leafing out stems with roots and then 'picked 'em off the spud.

Now this pic is worth maybe a thousand words.  This is one of the immersed sweet potato seed potatoes close up. 

• Most of these roots are growing out of the potato stemless. 

• There are sproutlike growing thingies just now turning from white to green and itty-bitty leaves forming. 

• Pitchfork has just picked off a slip - see the scar on the potato and its mate at the closest-up stem base, complete with more stem, leaves out-of-camera, and roots hanging on down. 

• Thumb and forefinger tip right at the stem's base to the potato and . . . pinch and twist . . .snap. 

Can't say what slipping has to do with this material and method . . . could better have been referred to as 'snaps' or 'pinch and twists' or the like.

The 'slip' or whatever got planted straightaway.

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So far, got about a dozen leafy stem-roots slips off of both potatoes together, expecting with some dozen or so more with encouragement, as below.

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Next, Pitchfork set about experimenting with 'encouragement' to the potatoes to produce more leafy stems with roots, figuring those have the best chance of growth to production.  Pitchfork thought the best way to get from here to there with bigger better slips (his opinion, better) was to get the base of rootless stems underwater.

First, he tried leaning one potato over, dunking the rootless stems.

There, you can see a couple of white stems, immersed from the start and not growing quickly.

Then he tried dunking the other potato all the way, putting a dish atop it to overcome the spud's natural buoyancy.

Now, even better views of submerged slips or slip sprouts going green and heading for the surface.

The first dunking worked swell in as little as a week for well developed stems.

The second dunking is expected to do well, too, but it's only been 2 days.

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Lesson:  Growing reproducible 'seedlings' for sweet potato reproduction is no more entirely a mystery.  Roughly a dozen or so plants can be expected from a single sweet potato using the immersion technique, particularly in full immersion

Lesson:  A problem of sorts arises from this method of sweet potato reproduction - plants of sizes over time, not of a size all at once, thereby confusing harvesting from a one-time undertaking and obliging a kind of 'rolling harvesting' - a task that could offer difficult-to-accomplish implications without unduly disturbing proximate, still short-of-harvest time, younger, producing plants.

Lesson:  Next time 'round, try another method of producing from sweet seed potatoes; namely, split one or more axially, bedding flat face-down over and under drained potting soil or similar.  Intention:  Raise slips for more contemporaneous planting.

Lesson:  Pitchfork and The Missus put one of the seed spuds in a glass dish and one in a plastic dish.  There were differences in propagation:  the glass dished seed sweet potato sprouted several more slips, larger slips, more quickly sprouted slips, and the water therein was consistently cleaner.