Several weeks ago, before pulling up all the sweet potato vines, I cut off some of the runners, cut them into about 12″ pieces, cut away some of the bottom leaves and stuck them in water.
We brought them in the garage during the couple of nights when we had a hard freeze. There are no windows and no real light in there so as soon as it got warm enough, I brought the pitcher outside. Just those few days of being out of the light, the leaves were a bit wilted when I noticed the sun was too much for them so I stuck them under the porch and they’re fine now.
You can see they’re already starting to produce new leaves!
I’m hoping these runners will grow enough leaves that we will have the greens to eat at least some this winter. I’m also hoping that I can plant the roots in the spring and they will produce sweet potatoes.
It’s a frosted plastic pitcher so it’s hard to see but those vines are full of roots already. I’m going to get plastic containers and separate them so I don’t end up with one container completely full of roots that turns into one big root ball.
It’s just an experiment but it will be fun to see if we get enough leaves to eat and if these roots will produce potatoes next year.
Linda Enneking says
I remember my mother taking a sweet potato and sticking a couple toothpicks in to suspend the bottom part of it in a jar of water so it would take root. She put it on a windowsill so it would make new leaves, which she would break off when she was ready to plant them in the garden. I think she started this process about 6 weeks ahead of when she wanted to plant. You could probably start them in late February or early March and keep them going until needed.
judy.blog@gmail.com says
We always did the sweet potato thing too. I’m pretty sure I can pick leaves off these vines and then plant the roots and get sweet potatoes so if that works, no need to do the toothpick thing. The patch of sweet potatoes that produced the most this year was a bed that I had where I pulled out all the white potatoes, found a sweet potato on the counter in the kitchen that was starting to sprout, buried it in that bed and I got over 20 of the nicest sweet potatoes from that one sprouting whole potato I planted.