Sweet Potato and Slip

Sweet Potato and Slip

Sweet Potato Slips 

Thank you to all who came out and helped plant the sweet potato patch. We really appreciate your efforts! I wish I took more pictures of people helping, but we were so busy, it slipped (pun intended). Share yours if you took some! The sweet potato slips were planted in record smooth time—mainly two days, plus a little. The slips don’t keep well for extended time in storage, so it’s good to move quickly. The plants look great!

Here are a few of the younger set that helped out:

How are sweet potatoes grown?

You start with what is called a sweet potato slip. A high quality, disease-free seed potato is planted and shoots sprout out from it. These shoots are called slips, for some reason—they are a stem and leaf. That is what you plant. Each slip will grow a big armful of sweet potatoes by August or September.

We used to think the slips go through a droopy transition until they adjust to the transplanting, but we have recently discovered the cure. We set up sprinklers and keep them misted after they are planted. They love it! The plants stay perky and don’t droop so much. Sometimes a spot doesn’t get enough misting, and it gets droopy, but those slips perk up in the next day and still do great.

Sweet Potato, the cow

On Monday, as the last few empty holes were filled with slips, we discovered we had a newborn calf in the field. The telltale sign is lots of low mooing by the herd, especially the new mom. They carry on and we check out what’s going on. Sure enough, our youngest cow had a calf with her. Appropriately enough, this cow’s name is Sweet Potato. We laughed about her giving birth to celebrate the planting of the sweet potato slips. Right away, the kids decided the calf would be named Slip.

Sweet Potato Slip, the calf

So, I’d like you to meet Sweet Potato and her baby girl, Slip: