Planting the Sweet Potato
On May 18, I planted my sweet potato slip.
“Wait, wait!” you may say. “What is a ‘slip’?”
Slips grow from the eyes of sweet potatoes. Before I learned about sweet potatoes at Honey’s Harvest Farm, I thought only white potatoes had eyes–those places where white tendrils start to sprout after the potato has been sitting at the bottom of the pantry for a few months. Where do sweet potato slips come from?
You can “plant” a whole sweet potato, or a chunk of one that includes part of the skin surface, into a pot of soil, barely covered, and eventually the slips (or sprouts) will grow from the eyes. Then you twist the leafy slips off, with as much of the roots as possible still attached to the stem, and plant them.
In the last post, “Preparing for Sweet Potatoes”, I wrote about getting the soil ready for the sweet potato plant. We prepared the soil so carefully because healthy, living soil makes healthy and nutritious plants, and those healthy and nutritious plants make healthy and nourished humans.
How does the quality of the dirt in which a plant is grown affect the plant’s nutrient content, though?
In his book Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey into Regenerative Agriculture, farmer Gabe Brown explains, “Once biology [in the soil] is killed, the soil no longer has the ability to supply the plants with all of the nutrients needed. The plant, then, will not be able to provide animals or humans the nutrients they need.” (Brown 188)
By biology, Brown means life. Earthworms, microbes, mycorrhizae (fungus). The soil on many farms today is dead; it contains none of these important elements, or very little. In fact, it’s not really soil at all–it’s just dirt.
Brown says, “… A healthy ecosystem–soil biology and the diverse, mutualistic relationships between microbes and plants … help transfer nutrients from the soil to the plants and eventually into us.” (Brown 189)
Plants absorb nutrients from the soil and we, in turn, absorb nutrients from plants. If the soil has been starved of the nutrients that living things (earthworms, microbes, and mycorrhizae) provide and recycle, the plant can’t access those nutrients–and neither can we. This is why it’s so important to make sure that your soil is healthy and full of life.
To plant your sweet potato slip, first gently (being sure to preserve the stem) strip off all but the top two or three leaves. Then dig a hole in the area you have prepared. Make sure the hole is big enough for the roots. Spray or pour water into this hole, put the slip in, cover the roots and a few inches of the stem with soil, and give the plant and its surrounding area a very thorough watering. And by “very thorough”, I mean that you should feel like you’re drowning it.
References: Brown, Gabe. Dirt to Soil. 2018.