- 1 hour ago
A simple change in how sweet potatoes are grown turned one slip into more than four times the harvest. The comparison in this gardening experiment follows five different ways to grow sweet potatoes, from a plain planting in the ground to a container setup and a deep hay method that produced the biggest payoff.
The video explains how sweet potato slips are started from a single store-bought potato, why warmth matters, and why cold ground can ruin the crop. It then shows the difference between bare ground, a tub, and burying the vines under a thick blanket of hay so they root along their length and swell more tubers. Along the way, it also covers planting, watering, loose soil, curing after harvest, and storing sweet potatoes for winter.
For gardeners looking for practical sweet potato growing tips, container gardening ideas, or a simple garden experiment with real results, this is a useful watch. It is especially relevant for homestead gardening, backyard food growing, and anyone trying to stretch a short season.
SEO: sweet potato growing methods, garden experiment, container gardening, hay mulch gardening, backyard gardening, homestead gardening, sweet potato slips, harvest comparison, and practical vegetable growing tips for better yields and winter storage.
The video explains how sweet potato slips are started from a single store-bought potato, why warmth matters, and why cold ground can ruin the crop. It then shows the difference between bare ground, a tub, and burying the vines under a thick blanket of hay so they root along their length and swell more tubers. Along the way, it also covers planting, watering, loose soil, curing after harvest, and storing sweet potatoes for winter.
For gardeners looking for practical sweet potato growing tips, container gardening ideas, or a simple garden experiment with real results, this is a useful watch. It is especially relevant for homestead gardening, backyard food growing, and anyone trying to stretch a short season.
SEO: sweet potato growing methods, garden experiment, container gardening, hay mulch gardening, backyard gardening, homestead gardening, sweet potato slips, harvest comparison, and practical vegetable growing tips for better yields and winter storage.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00I planted three sweet potato slips on the same spring day, in the same ground, from the same parent,
00:06and I tended all three the same all season long.
00:10And when I dug them in the fall, one plant gave me near six pounds,
00:14a fine honest harvest any gardener would be glad of.
00:18But another plant, the very same slip, planted the very same day, gave me better than twenty.
00:25Four times the food, from a start no different, for one plain change in how it was grown,
00:31that cost me nothing but a little hay I had lying about.
00:35I am going to show you that change, and by the end, you will never grow a sweet potato the
00:41old plain way again.
00:43Now the sweet potato has a reputation as a hard crop, a thing for the hot south,
00:49and no business of folk in a cooler, shorter summer.
00:52And there is a grain of truth in that, for it is a long-season plant that loves heat.
00:58But the trick I am going to give you is the very thing that helps most,
01:02where the season is short and the summer is uncertain.
01:05So do not click away thinking this is not for your country.
01:09It may be the most for your country.
01:12I gathered the whole of it into a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:16The book is the long version. If you want it, it is there. I will not mention it again.
01:23First, you must understand what a sweet potato even is, for folk have it confused with the common potato,
01:30and they are not the same thing at all, not even cousins.
01:34The common potato you grow from a piece of the potato itself with an eye on it.
01:39The sweet potato you grow from a slip, which is a little rooted sprout that grows up out of the
01:45potato.
01:45And here is the thrifty part.
01:47You can make your own slips from a single, store-bought sweet potato. No need to buy them.
01:53You take a good, firm sweet potato, stick a few toothpicks round its middle,
01:58and set it half in a jar of water on a warm windowsill, the fat end down in the water.
02:05In a few weeks, it sends roots down into the water and green sprouts up out of the top.
02:11When those sprouts are a good five or six inches tall, you snap them off,
02:16set them in a little water or a small pot to root, and each one becomes a plant.
02:22One sweet potato from the store can give you a dozen slips, a dozen plants, for the price of the
02:28one.
02:29That alone is worth knowing.
02:31One word of care on this, mind.
02:34Some store sweet potatoes are treated to stop them sprouting, so they sit pretty on the shelf,
02:40and those will stubbornly refuse to slip for you no matter how long you wait.
02:45If you can, start from an organic one, or one you know has sprouted on its own in the bin,
02:51and you will have far better luck.
02:54And a slip wants warmth to get going, so keep that jar somewhere warm,
02:59atop the cold box, or near a sunny window, not in a cold back room.
03:05Now, when the slips are rooted, and the weather is warm and settled,
03:09for the sweet potato will sulk and die in cold ground, so you never rush it out, you plant them.
03:16And here is where I set my three plants to the test,
03:19three different ways to see which was best.
03:22The first way was the plain way, the way near everyone grows them.
03:27A slip set into good ground, in a sunny spot, and left to grow.
03:32Nothing fancy, no special feeding, just a slip in the earth.
03:37This is the honest baseline, the way your grandmother would have done it,
03:41and the way most folk still do.
03:43The second way was in a container, a big tub, for the folk who have no ground to speak of,
03:50only a patio or a step.
03:51I filled a good large tub, and mind, a large one, fifteen or twenty gallons if you have it,
03:58for a skimpy pot grows a skimpy crop, with a loose soil lightened with a bit of sand,
04:04for the sweet potato likes a loose, open root run, and will swell a smooth tuber far better in sandy,
04:11open soil than in heavy clay.
04:14I worked in a little extra of the mineral that feeds root and tuber as well, and set a slip
04:20in that.
04:20The good of a tub is that you can make the soil exactly as the plant likes it, where in
04:26the open ground you are stuck with what you have.
04:29And the third way was the one that shocked me, and it is the plainest of all.
04:34I set the slip in the good ground, same as the first, but then, as it grew, I buried it
04:40deep in hay.
04:41Not a thin mulch, mind, a great thick blanket of it, piling the hay up around and over the vines
04:48as they ran, a foot and more of loose hay heaped on.
04:52That is the whole of the difference. Same slip, same ground, same sun. Only, one grew bare, and one grew
05:00under a deep hay blanket.
05:02Now let me tell you plainly what came up when I dug them, for the plain result is the whole
05:08lesson.
05:08The container plant gave a respectable crop, a good six or seven pounds from the one slip, which for a
05:15body with no ground at all is a fine return off a patio.
05:19The plain ground plant, the baseline, gave near six pounds, sound and honest, the harvest most folk would expect and
05:27be happy with.
05:28But the deep hay plant gave better than twenty-two pounds from that single slip, one sweet potato in it
05:35so great the kitchen scale would not weigh it, and I had to carry it off to a bigger one.
05:41Four times the food, near enough, from the very same start. That is not a small thing. That is the
05:48difference between a nice side dish and a winter's worth of eating.
05:51Now I will be square with you, for I am no man of laboratories, and this was one season in
05:58one garden, and some small part of any such difference is only the ordinary variance of the thing, one plant
06:05doing better than its neighbor for reasons no man can name.
06:08I would not have you think every deep hay plant beats every bare one by four to one every time.
06:15But the difference here was far too great to be mere chance, and the reason behind it is sound and
06:21old and worth your understanding.
06:23For once you grasp the why, you can make it work in your own ground.
06:28So here is the why, and it is the heart of the whole video.
06:32A sweet potato does not make its crop only down at the one spot where you planted the slip, the
06:37way a common potato clusters its harvest at its base.
06:41The sweet potato runs long vines out across the ground, and here is the thing most folk never know.
06:47Those vines will root down wherever they touch moist soil along their length.
06:53Every place a vine roots down, that is another mouth drinking up water and strength, and another place tubers can
07:00swell.
07:00When the vine runs bare across dry open ground, it roots little and feeds only the one crown.
07:07But when you bury those running vines deep in moist hay, every foot of vine under that hay roots down
07:14into the cool damp and goes to work.
07:17So that one plant becomes, in effect, a dozen feeding points instead of one.
07:22The deep hay keeps the ground cool and evenly moist.
07:26It keeps the weeds down.
07:28And above all, it gives those hungry vines the cool damp cover they want to root along their whole length.
07:34More rooting vines.
07:36More energy gathered.
07:38More energy sent down into the tubers as the season closes.
07:42That is the whole secret.
07:43You are not growing one plant.
07:45You are growing a dozen, joined as one.
07:48And this is the very reason it helps most in a cooler or shorter season country, which surprises folk.
07:55The deep hay blanket holds the warmth of the day in the soil through the cool night, steadying the ground.
08:01And it keeps the moisture even.
08:03And the sweet potato, above all, wants steady warmth and steady damp over a long stretch.
08:09The hay gives it a gentler, longer, more even season than the bare ground ever could.
08:15So the very places that struggle to grow a sweet potato at all are the places this deep hay way
08:21helps the most.
08:23Now let me walk you the method plain, so you can do it yourself.
08:27You start your slips in the jar, as I told you, in good time before the warm weather, for they
08:32want weeks to root.
08:33You wait, and I mean you wait, until the cold is well and truly past, and the ground has warmed.
08:40For a sweet potato set into cold ground does nothing but sit and rot.
08:46Then you set your rooted slips into good loose ground in the sunniest spot you have, a couple feet apart,
08:53for they will run far and wide.
08:55Do not feed them heavy on the nitrogen mind, for too rich a feeding grows you a great jungle of
09:01handsome vine and a poor thin crop of tubers underneath,
09:05the plant putting all its strength into leaf and none into root.
09:10Lean ground grows the better sweet potato.
09:13You let them grow and get established a few weeks, and then, as the vines begin to run, you begin
09:20heaping the hay.
09:21Not all at once smothering the young plant, but building it up as the vines lengthen, tucking the runners down
09:28into the hay,
09:29and piling it a good foot deep or more around and over them, leaving the growing tips free to reach
09:37the light.
09:38You keep it watered through the dry spells, for even under hay a long-season crop wants drink,
09:44and then you leave it be to run and root and swell all the long summer.
09:49And you do not rush the harvest, for this is a long-season plant, and every extra warm week is
09:57more food.
09:58You wait until the fall, until the vines yellow or the first light frost touches the tops,
10:05and then you dig, careful and wide, for the tubers run far from the crown and a hasty fork will
10:12spear your best one.
10:14Lift the hay and follow the rooted vines, and you will find tubers swelled all along where they went down,
10:22not just at the one old planting spot.
10:25Then, and this matters, you do not eat them straight from the ground.
10:30A fresh dug sweet potato is starchy and dull.
10:34You cure it, which is to set them somewhere warm and humid, a good eighty degrees or so if you
10:41can manage it,
10:41for a week or two, and in that curing a wonderful thing happens.
10:46The bland starch turns to sugar, so the potato grows sweeter the longer it is cured,
10:53and the skin toughens and heals its little digging nicks so it will keep without rotting.
10:59A sweet potato eaten the day it is dug is a dull, starchy thing.
11:04The same one cured a fortnight is candy.
11:08And only after that curing do you move them to store, kept cool but never cold,
11:14for a sweet potato hates the cold box and will take harm from it,
11:19so a cool dark cupboard or cellar shelf is its place.
11:23Cured right and stored right, they will feed you deep into the winter,
11:28growing no worse and often sweeter as they wait.
11:32My grandfather never spoke of methods and experiments,
11:36but he grew his vining crops, his squash and his sweet potatoes,
11:41up on great heaps of old spoiled hay and rotted manure at the edge of the garden,
11:47the stuff too far gone for the stock to eat.
11:50I asked him once why he planted his best vines in the rubbish heap.
11:54He said the vine does not know it is rubbish.
11:58It only knows it is deep and warm and damp,
12:01and it roots the whole way down it and pays me back double.
12:06He had no fancy name for what he was doing.
12:09He had only watched, season upon season,
12:12where the vines did best and set them there.
12:16I understand now that he had found this very thing
12:19long before any experiment proved it.
12:22The old people arrived at the truth by watching,
12:26the same truth, only without the weighing scale.
12:30So let me say plainly, who gains by you not knowing this?
12:34No one sells you a deep blanket of hay,
12:37so there is little money in teaching it.
12:40But there is money in the fancy fertilizers and the special tubs
12:44and the grow bags sold to boost a crop that a few forkfuls of free spoiled hay would boost far
12:52more.
12:53It is not that anyone schemed it so.
12:56It is only that a thing you buy is remembered and sold,
12:59and a heap of old hay given free by the field is quietly forgotten.
13:04No one coordinated it.
13:07It just rolled on by itself until the plainest, cheapest way to a great harvest fell clean out of mind.
13:15Now tell me this in the comments.
13:18Have you grown sweet potatoes before?
13:20And which way?
13:21In the ground?
13:22In a tub?
13:23Or buried in mulch?
13:25And what did you dig?
13:26And tell me as well how long and how hot your summer runs where you are,
13:32for the sweet potato above all is ruled by the length of the warm season,
13:37and I would know which of you has the long summer for it
13:40and which of you most needs the deep hay trick to stretch a short one.
13:45Next time I will show you how to cure and store that harvest
13:48so it sweetens and keeps clear through the winter,
13:52for digging the crop is but the half of it.
13:54But for now, when you set your slips this year,
13:58do not leave them bare on the open ground.
14:01Bury those running vines deep in hay,
14:04and let one plant do the work of a dozen.
14:08The people who built this country with their hands knew that,
14:11and we are only just starting to remember it.