Can you just plant a sweet potato?
Category:
food and drink
world cuisines
Sweet potatoes aren't started by seed like most other vegetables, they're started from slips. Slips are shoots that are grown from a mature sweet potato. You can order slips from a mail order or Internet catalog or you can start slips from a sweet potato you bought at the store or one from your garden.
In this regard, can you plant a whole sweet potato?
"Slipping" is when you grow little baby plants out of a whole sweet potato. Now, you can just bury whole sweet potatoes very shallowly if you like, but many gardeners prefer to grow slips from the tubers and then plant the slips. The green 'slips' will sprout from the sides and top of the tuber.
Keeping this in view, how do you grow sweet potatoes from a sweet potato?
Place the sweet potato in a container of water. Keep the top 1/3 of the potato exposed by placing toothpicks into the sides. The pointed end should be down in the water. In a few weeks a vine with several stems will begin to sprout.
One sweet potato should yield about 12 plants.