Last edited on November 29, 2025. View history
Sweet Potato
How to sow sweet potato: Slips
Sun requirement for sweet potato: Plant in Full Sun
The sweet potato is a large, starchy, tuberous root. The tuber is long and tapered and has yellow, orange, red, brown, purple, or beige skin. It's flesh can be white, red, pink, violet, yellow, orange, or purple. Sweet potato cultivars with white or pale yellow flesh are not as sweet and moist as those with red, pink or orange flesh. The heart-shaped leaves and vines are sometimes eaten as greens when the plants are young, but eating the leaves interferes with the growth of the tuber underground. The sweet potato is not related to the potato or the yam.
A plant grows with warmth, not with days. A growing degree day is one day's worth of useful warmth: how many degrees the day's average temperature is above the lowest temperature the crop grows at. Add them up from planting and you know how far along the crop is, whatever the calendar says.
Say that lowest temperature is 10°C. A day averaging 17°C gives 7 growing degree days. A day averaging 8°C gives none, as it is too cold for the crop to grow. That is why the same lettuce takes about 50 days in a summer and 90 in an autumn: it needs the same total warmth either way.
For sweet potato, the FAO EcoCrop database gives a lowest growing temperature of 10°C and a shortest growing cycle of 80 days at its best temperature, about 1040 growing degree days to a first harvest.
Where you've told us where your garden is, we use this and the weather there to predict when your sweet potato will be ready to harvest. We don't use it for how long a plant lives or when it finishes: we go by what members have logged for that.
Only plantings by members who have set their locations are shown.
by maco,
I've got seeds either on-hand or ordered for just about everything I'm starting from seed this year. I've been working out what I want to plant, and this is the plan I've come up with for the 72 square feet of my backyard raised beds:
arugula
basils
beets
cabbages
cauliflowers
cucumbers
eggplants
garlic
kale
lettuces
onions
oregano
parsley
Hungarian wax peppers
bell peppers
zucchini
yellow summer squash
butternut squash
sweet potatoes
tomatoes
super sweet 100 tomatoes
chamomiles
by robin,
I planted these sweet potatoes on 5-26-14. Could someone tell me when they can be harvested? I've read that the vines need to look dry on the ends. However, I don't thinkg they are ready yet. I also read that they need about four months in the ground to mature. That would mean they won…
sweet potatoes
by neotoma,
I had the first tiny strawberry of the season today! I'm looking forward to many more.
Also, I transplanted a lot of seedlings into the community garden today: 2 cucumbers, 3 green beans, 2 tongue-of-fire beans, an ornamental [sweet potato](/crops/swee…
green beans
sweet potatoes
artichokes
lettuces
radishes
carrots
parsnips
sunflowers
strawberries
by oakandsage,
Something's skeletonizing my carrots and dill. It did a number on the sweet basil I planted, and is taking out the kale plants one by one. I haven't caught it in the act yet, though I've seen a couple big fat grasshoppers around; they're pretty lik…
carrots
dill
blueberries
sweet potatoes
cauliflowers
View all sweet potato harvests
Sign in or sign up to track your sweet potato harvests.Data from the FAO EcoCrop database for Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.
| Family / Taxonomy | Magnoliopsida Asteridae Solanales Convolvulaceae |
|---|---|
| Killing temperature | growth: 5 °C, rest: 1 °C |
| Optimal soil depth | medium (50-150 cm) |
| Optimal soil fertility | high |
| Optimal soil salinity | low (<4 dS/m) |
Resources outside Growstuff.
dill
bush bean
Photos
maco harvested 43, weighing 5.41 kg.
View all sweet potato seeds