How to grow Sweet Potatoes

Learn how to grow delicious Sweet Potato in your own organic garden at home.

Sweet Potato prefers loose, well draining soil with plenty of compost mixed in. 

Plant your Sweet Potato in a full sun position for best results. Plants will tolerate some afternoon shade.

No. Sweet Potato vines are frost tender. 

Plant Sweet Potato roughly 40cm apart. 

Sweet Potato are warm season crops and prefer to be grown in temperatures in above  21°C (70°F).

Plant 'slips' that grow from sprouting tubers in spring once the soil has warmed and once the danger of frost has passed.

Apply an organic fertiliser to your Sweet Potato vines throughout the season. 

Sweet Potato Tubers are usually ready for harvest roughly 4 months from planting in warmer climates and 6 months in cooler climates. To harvest, pull back the vines to reveal their base and use a garden fork to gently loosen the soil to find the Potatoes. Harvest as required or pull the entire vine out for a complete harvest. Both the leaves and the tubers are edible. 

Pests that can affect Sweet Potato include: Aphids, Snail, Slug, Sweet Potato Stem Borer, White Grub, Mealybug, Mice, Rats. 

Diseases that can affect Sweet Potato include: Alternaria leaf spot & Leaf and Stem Blight, Black Rot, Fusarium Root and Stem Rot, Sweet Potato Virus. 

Sweet Potato are hardy plants that are for the most part, pest and disease free.

Sweet Potato form a dense green ground cover. Tubers are often found some distance away from the plant's primary crown so be sure to dig carefully and thoroughly.