Growing Sweet Potatoes Slips: A Fun at Home Science Experiment
I love growing things with my children. We get messy, we occasionally break things, they step on my seedlings. It’s all good… but growing sweet potatoes avoids most of those less desirable pit falls and still gives your kids a great look at plant science.
What’s more is that growing sweet potato slips is just amazing, the process is real easy and watching the tender new growth emerge from the potato is entrancing.
Besides that, sweet potato leaves are edible just like the tuber itself so if you are just doing this as a science experiment without any intention to plant the slips you could still chop them up into a sweet potato salad that would have a similar taste to spinach.
During the colder winter months, sweet potatoes go dormant but as the warmer spring months approach they will sometimes start to sprout on their own.
Here in Southern Wisconsin, we started our experiment in March, around the Spring Equinox so our slips would be ready to go out in Mid-May around the time tomatoes start going out to gardens.
You will need organic sweet potatoes for this experiment so you can be guaranteed the tubers haven’t been treated to prevent sprouting. Take your organic sweet potato and bury it halfway in some soil inside a tray with good drainage. I planted our potatoes inside a couple plastic take-out containers to which I added rocks in the bottom.
Next you lightly water the container and place the potatoes in a warm location. Ours stayed under our counter in a cabinet next to a heat register; the plants did not get any sun down there but they did get warm and that’s needed in this stage of the game.
Within a week ours started showing signs of life. Visiting the sweet potatoes with my young ones and observing closely revealed -first tiny nobs that began to jut out from the sides of the tubers then long straight sprouts unfurled, reaching upward.
Once the sprouts reached a height of 5 inches we snapped them off and placed them in a container in water. My four year old was most enthusiastic about getting to use the measuring tape to measure the sprouts and help snap them off.
Don’t worry too much about damaging the plants when little hands harvest. Sweet potatoes are a wonderfully resilient plant that can sprout roots from any part of it’s vine.
Sometimes we would open up the cabinet, and woah! There were so many sprouts coming out of our potatoes, touching the top of the drawer above. We noticed we got the most sprouts in the days after we watered — every four to five days.
Once our sprouts had sat out on the counter for awhile they began to turn green which created this really wonderful gradient effect in our plants and lead to a lot of discussions about chlorophyll’s role in photosynthesis, how plants make food and the things plants need to survive.
We had so much fun growing sweet potato sprouts in our kitchen this year that we ended up growing way more than we needed for our garden. We will have quite a few to give away and perhaps we’ll allocate more space for this crop next year.
Either way though, I know we will be doing this experiment again. My children and I thoroughly enjoyed bringing our apparently lifeless tuber back to life while not much else was growing those early spring days.
