It was a cold weekend…

Oddly enough, it was perfect to start some of the flowers for this spring. The last few years, we’ve been starting our own sweet potato slips and moving them out the the garden. We normally plant two or three slips and end up with a few meals of sweet potatoes in the fall. With how well that’s work the last few years, I thought we’d experiment this year and try to start our own decorative sweet potato vines for in the flower pots around the house as well.

Last fall, when we were cleaning out the flower pots for the fall, we saved five of the tubers we found in the flower pots off the sweet potato vines. Three of them kept until this Sunday, so I figured we might as well start early.

Starting slips is really pretty simple. Suspend a sweet potato in a container of water with half in and half out. Set it in a warm sunny spot and wait. Once the slips are a couple inches tall, you carefully remove them and suspend them in a container of water until they have adequate roots to be planted in potting soil.

Just to be clear, there is a difference between the sweet potatoes grown for food and the decorative sweet potato vines. From what I’ve been told, while both plants will produce plenty of foliage and a cluster of tubers, the decorative variety has been breed for foliage for so long that the tuber is no longer edible. I just hope starting slips still works the same.

Now all we have to do is wait and see. If it doesn’t work – at least it feels like spring is getting closer.