Planting True Sweetpotato Seed

In addition to growing potatoes from true seed (TPS) this year we will be growing some sweetpotatoes from true sweetpotato seed for the first time.

Sweetpotato (Ipomea batatas) is one of the most nutritious and high yielding crops, right up in competition with potatoes themselves. Becoming self sufficient in sweetpotato production has been a goal here at Oxbow Farm for a long time. We have successfully grown sweetpotatoes the standard way growing them from slips, but just like with potatoes, we really want to try growing them from seed and producing our own varieties. Commercially bred sweetpotatoes are for the most part developed for warmer regions with longer growing seasons. Sweetpotatoes like to grow in hot weather with very warm soil conditions, so selecting for sweetpotato clones that can develop good sized roots in our climate should be a fun and interesting endeavor.

A great resource online is Aster Lane Edibles blog, where Telsing Andrews details her journey growing new sweetpotato varieties from true seed near Ottawa in Ontario. If Telsing can succeed with sweetpotatoes up with the polar bears then we should have no problem down here. Check out her wonderful sweetpotato content! http://www.asterlaneedibles.ca/projec...

There is not a lot of information about growing sweetpotato from seed available online. The biggest resource is actually forum posts by Reed on the Homegrown Goodness forum and on the OSSI Plant Breeding forum. As it happens , Reed is the source of most of my stock of true sweetpotato seed that I'm planting in this video. I received seed in trade from him and some more seed derived from his breeding work from another friend FarmerMike in California. Between the two of them I suddenly had a good stock of seed to experiment with.

The main issues with saving seed from sweetpotato is that like most species in the genus Ipomea, sweetpotato is self incompatible. So any pollen produced by an individual is incapable of germinating and setting seed on its own flowers. Since most sweetpotatoes are grown in large patches of a single clone, there is never any compatible pollen to allow for seeds to be formed. Many sweetpotato clones produce huge quantities of flowers, but two genetically distinct clones neet to be grown together to get any quantities of seed to be produced.