A sweet potato slip is a piece of sweet potato vine stem with roots and leaves. Sweet potatoes are not grown from seed, but are vegetatively produced.
The easiest way to make your own slips is to go to the market or grocery store and buy some organic sweet potatoes. You need to buy organic because the non-organic sweet potatoes are treated with a chemical to prevent sprouts from forming.
Below is a photo of some small organic sweet potatoes I bought from Publix supermarket. There were several varieties in one package. I left them alone for a week or so and you can see that the sprouts are already starting to form.
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| Close-up of a new "slip" forming on an organic sweet potato. |
Another way to get slips is to take some cuttings from a sweet potato vine and place them in water. The hotter the weather, the faster they will root. In the photo below, I placed some cuttings into a vase with water.
The weather was quite warm, so the cuttings produced roots in about 2 days (photo below). I left them in the vase until the cutting formed a lot of roots, which took about 10 days or so.
After one of my harvests, I had a lot of sweet potatoes that were too small to clean and cook, so I just left them in a pile in the yard until I decided what to do with them. It was late summer and we were getting daily rains, so they quickly sent up sprouts (photo below), which could be harvested as slips to plant.
As you can see, there are several ways to produce sweet potato slips.
In the video below, gardener Wendi Phan explains how she grows sweet potato slips.
If you don't want to bother with growing slips yourself, you can buy them online during the springtime and early summer.
You may also be able to find rooted sweet potato slips, like the ones in the photo below, at your local garden center.
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| Sweet potato plants from Home Depot garden center. Variety: Beauregard. |
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