Our small wins last year growing sweet potatoes had me pumped to try to produce more potatoes this year. I gathered up some sprouted, store-bought russet potatoes from our pantry and some gnarly-looking orange sweet potatoes from last year’s harvest. Always eager to try something different, I also sourced organic Stokes purple sweet potatoes which are purple inside and out, have 4x the Vitamin C as orange sweet potatoes, and the same antioxidants as blueberries.

I attempted to start growing my sweet potato slips late-March when we were supposed to be beyond our expected last frost and it seemed like things were warming up. Unfortunately, as we know, it didn’t stay warm for long. I tried growing the seed potatoes inside the house on top of our fridge. I tried growing them outside on top of concrete. Alas, the wonky weather would not let me be great and I got absolutely no slip growth. That was until I had the crazy idea to put my seed potatoes in the attic. I remembered that sweet potatoes don’t need light to sprout. They only need HEAT and the attic is the warmest place on our suburban homestead. Slip growth took off almost immediately!

Every couple days or so, I go into our attic to water the potato trays and harvest slips. To date, I’ve gotten 194 slips from my attic potatoes. Insane. I said I wanted to grow more potatoes, but I didn’t mean THIS MANY more. LOL! While this is way more sweet potato plants than I was planning to have this year, I also wasn’t planning to have an additional growing lot this year. My revised plan is to plug sweet potato plants all over the community food forest and utilize them as edible ground cover. Our neighbors will be able to harvest the yummy greens all Summer long until the potato tubers are ready for harvest late-Fall. Meanwhile, Shannon will have less grass to cut. It’s a win-win! I suspect our peeps are gonna be excited about this unexpected abundance in the food forest.