When to harvest sweet potatoes and how to do it right

20.08.2024 - 02:59 / savvygardening.com / Niki Jabbour

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A great exercise in garden patience is in learning when to harvest sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are a long-season crop and it takes months for the tubers to mature, but the anticipation grows right along with the vines and roots.This popular vegetable is not difficult to grow and a great crop for in-ground gardens, raised beds, and containers. Because sweet potatoes are root tubers that grow entirely underground, you can’t judge their harvest readiness by their color, size, or shape. When to harvest sweet potatoes depends on a number of factors, and I’ll cover those here, along with how to cure and store sweet potatoes, plus a few tips for growing the biggest sweet potatoes.

In America, sweet potatoes are thought of as a Thanksgiving holiday-meal staple. Looking at the Thanksgiving table, most of the standard foods are fall-harvested seasonal fare: turkey, cranberries, pumpkin, and sweet potatoes. We plant sweet potatoes in the late spring but have to wait as many as 4 months to dig them up in the fall. Don’t confuse sweet potatoes with yams, however, which are tropical plants. And sweet potatoes are also not related to white potatoes. Each of these crops belongs to different families and has different growth habits and needs.

For me, a shorter list would cover why not to grow sweet potatoes. There are so many reasons to add sweet potatoes to your plot or your container garden:

• Sweet potatoes have beautiful, sprawling vines that can reach 20 feet. These are lovely garden accents, and there are even strictly ornamental varieties of sweet potato vines that