Sweet Potato storage

[Gary Woods]

Well, my first attempt was an incomplete disaster: The mail-order plants looked puny, and the deer eating the foliage (twice!) didn't help any more than my neglect in weeding or keeping the electric fence clear. When the wire came off one of the insulators in the back corner and laid right across the metal post, I might as well have put up a sign: "Bambi and friends! Free salad buffet!"

But that's not the question, which is: How long can I expect the 4 carrot-sized tubers I got to keep in a cool dry cellar pantry? Do I have any chance of growing the cuttings I took before frost through winter to get my own plants in the spring.

OK, so that's _two_ questions.

The cuttings, which rooted quickly in water and now live in a glass on the windowsill should really be potted in dirt, no?

Grow lights, which won't go up for a couple of weeks for reasons to convoluted to list here, would probably help?

Well, 4.....Those who are old enough are welcome to enumerate the attributes of the Spanish Inquisition, which nobody expects.

Peace,

Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at home.earthlink.net/~garygarlic Zone 5/6 in upstate New York, 1420' elevation. NY WO G

[farmerdill]

1. As long as the temps are above 50 degrees F and you put them in paper bag for moisyure retention, they should keep till late spring.
2. Treat those cuttings as an ornamental vining house plant and they should go indefinitely. You will have to trim them back from time to time. As long as you have light from a window, you probably will not need grow lights.

[Dwayne]

friends! Free salad buffet!"

I still have 6 that I raised during the summer of 2005. After digging then I cured them for 2 weeks in the warmest room in the house, and them put them down in the basement where it stays about 67F. I entered them in the Fair the first week in august, received a blue ribbon,a, brought them home and here they still are. I am going to see if they will keep until March and if so, I will try to raise a crop of slips from them.

I would wait until spring and see what you have, but that isnt the way to raise a sweet potato slip. In March I lay between 10 and 15 sweet potatoes into a plastic gardening tray that is approx 2 ft long and 16 inches wide. They can touch, but not lay on each other. Then I put about 1/2 inch of water in the tray and set it on top of my deep freeze. The top stays warm because it is a frosts free freezer, and that starts the slips. Then when it is warm enough outside that it wont frost anymore, I set the tray on the deck. Then as I need them, I pull the slips off the potatoes, clean the bottom leaves off and set them into a can 1/2 full of water. They stay there for 3 days to several weeks, until I am ready to plant them.

If I can help you any further, e-mail me. Remember when you dig the crop, the smaller ones taste better than the larger ones. I wash them off really good, pat them dry, coat them with cooking oil, roll them in tin foil and bake them for an hour at 350 degrees. They are so sweet (if you cured them properly) that I dont have to add sugar, and moist enough I dont have to add butter.

Dwayne

[Jim Ferguson]

"!"

We are in a sweet-potato growing area here with a number of large growers. I buy a 40-lb box every October and we still some in May of the next year. I keep them in a cool room and they seem to get better in a couple of months after they are picked.

[John Savage]

Probably not very long. 1 or 2 weeks. If any has been scratched or cut with a knife then it is likely to spoil from that point and once started spoilage spreads quickly. Store-bought sweet pots can store for months, but they are fully matured and dry and I only store those showing no surface damage and which have no cuts, none on the stem end and none on the tip end. Only where the ends have preserved the natural tapers to their tip do they have potential for lengthy storage; if you can see a cut section of potato then expect it to soon go mouldy there with time.

Ideally, yes, but they seem to stay healthy growing in water for weeks. Do you have a sunny window where you could stand them planted in soil?

It's a bit difficult to explain the taste, but I find that whenever a sweet potato develops even a tiny bit of rot or mold then the whole of that tuber carries an unpleasant taint, no matter how much I cut off and discard before cooking. So I advise against storing them until you see a tiny bit of decay--that's too late to stop the whole thing being spoilt in taste.

The best way to cook both white and pink sweet potatoes is to wash the whole tuber clean, dry it and rub all over with olive oil, puncture all over a dozen times to 1 cm depth with a kitchen fork, then sit it on a piece of oiled aluminium foil on a shelf in the oven. Cook until it is nicely browned and collapses on being pressed with a fork.