06/08/2026
A sweet potato doesn't grow the way a regular potato does. You don't cut it. You don't bury it. You grow plants off its skin and pull them away 🍠
Set a sweet potato in warmth and moisture and it does something strange — leafy shoots push straight out of the tuber's surface. Each of those shoots is a "slip," a whole future plant. Let them reach six inches to a foot, twist them off, and stand them in a cup of water. Roots appear in days. One tuber gives you a handful of rooted slips, sometimes many more.
Here's the part that trips people up: this is a warm-season crop, the opposite of everything else in the spring garden. Sweet potato slips are frost-tender and sulk in cold ground. You wait until well after your last frost — soil at sixty-plus degrees, warm nights — before they go out. Rush them into cool spring soil and they rot.
🌿 How to grow from slips:
- Sprout a whole sweet potato in a warm, bright spot until shoots reach six inches to a foot
- Twist each slip off the tuber and stand the bottom half in water; roots form within a few days
- Wait to transplant until three to four weeks after your last frost, once the soil has warmed to at least sixty degrees
- Plant each rooted slip four to six inches deep with the leaves above ground, about a foot apart in loose soil — the buried nodes become the storage roots
🌱 One thing to watch for:
- Get them out of the ground before the first hard frost in fall. Frost damage runs downward from the vines into the roots, so if the tops get hit, dig right away
One sweet potato on a warm windowsill is a whole bed waiting to happen — just don't let it touch cold soil 🍠
