How-To Corner
Sweet potatoes, a common crop in the Ozarks, aren't grown from seed, but from transplanted sprouts called "slips."
If you have a place to grow this vegetable, kids can have a lot of fun getting ready to plant their own sweet potatoes for eating in the fall. Just place a sweet potato in moist sand and keep it relatively warm. Within four to six weeks, it will produce 10 to 20 slips. Carefully separate the new slip, keeping its root system intact. Plant the slips outside, spacing them about a foot apart. Add a mulch of straw or dry leaves. Caution: Unlike Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes like warm soil and don't need to be planted outside until May. It takes 100 days or so until they are ready to harvest. In any case, dig them before frost.
If you don't have a place to grow sweet potatoes to eat, you can use a sweet potato like you find at the grocery store to make a lovely, vining houseplant. They were once common houseplants for sunny kitchen windows, the beautiful vines with their purplish-green leaves trained around the window. Help your kids choose a firm sweet potato. Using toothpicks, suspend the sweet potato, fat end up, in a jar so that water cover the small end. Put in a warm dark place and keep water in the jar. Roots will form first, then a stem. When the stem appears, move to a sunny window. You can leave the plant in water, or, after a month or so, pot the plant in potting mix, keeping the soil moist and feeding once a month with a balanced, water-soluble fertilizer. The stems are weak, so tie them to a stake. As the vine grows, you can cut it back a little to force the plant to get bushy. |
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