| Growing Sweet Potato Slips in a Covered Bed |
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James Carter, Steuben County, New York
In Johnson County, Tennessee, the parents of my first wife raised sweet potatoes for cash crop. To sterilize the soil for the bed to prepare slips (shoots) they would pile brush on an area 6 feet wide and 12 feet long, and burn it. That got rid of weed seeds.
They would then dig out the bed to about 12" depth, and put in a 6-inch layer of partly decomposed horse manure, not fresh, but still active enough to get hot. On top of the horse manure they put a layer of fine soil 4 inches thick, and then laid down 3 or 4 bushels of whole sweet potatoes being careful not to let them touch each other or they will rot. They put about 3 inches of very fine soil on top of the sweet potatoes.
Around the bed they made a wall from boards about 1" thick and 8 or 10 inches wide, and laid cheese cloth over the boards to make a roof for the bed. This was done in early spring, and the cheese cloth helped hold in moisture and protected the sweet potatoes from frost and provided shade for the new growing slips.
The bed would soon be thick with sprouts 8 to 10 inches long. When the sprouts started pushing against the cheese cloth it would be removed, but with care to not let the sprouts be killed by a late frost.
The slips were collected by gently breaking them off at their base, and they would be wrapped up in bundles of 25 or 50 slips each.
My dad would buy slips to plant. One year we grew about an acre of sweet potatoes, with tomatoes planted in the same hill. My dad would hill up soil about 8 or 9 inches high, with the hills 12 to 14 inches apart in three-foot rows. He put cow manure in the bottom of the hill to nourish the sweet potatoes. He would hold the slip in his left hand, make a hole with a dibble stick about 3 inches deep, and put the slip into the hole. Then he would pour some water in the hole and firm the soil around the plant. The slips were about 18 inches long, and all the part that was underground produced roots. By growing in fine cultivated soil the sweet potatoes at harvest would be rounder and easy to harvest. If they had to form in hard clay they would be narrow and hard to get out of the soil.
When the weeds between the rows were about 4 to 10 inches tall, Dad used a cultivator plow to keep the weeds from getting the nourishment from the soil. The cultivator was pulled by a horse and had two wide tines in front and three behind. The tines had wings so they would cut off the weeds below the soil surface. Because summers in eastern Tennessee were warm and dry, the weeds would die from lack of moisture. Dad only had to cultivate the sweet potatoes once or twice.
