This year I will be planting potatoes (Yukon Gold and Russet) as well as sweet potatoes.
This coming weekend I will be building so-called "potato towers" for the Yukons & Russets using the designs prescribed in this YouTube video. I purchased actual seed potatoes for both varieties and plan on having one Yukon tower and one Russet tower. Fingers crossed.
As for the sweet potatoes, I bought them at an organic food store and I've been following this Dengarden article for starting the slips. Basically I took a few sweet potatoes, cut them in half, and stuck them in tin foil trays full of growing medium (quality soil & organic veggie fertilizer mix). And I've been keeping them on warming pads for the last few weeks, out of light.
Most of the sweet potatoes have now grown these long, ragged, purple "slips" (or is it chutes? I can never tell the difference!) and these slips have started to grow small green leaves.
The Dengarden article (linked above) wants me to wait until the leaves get a little bigger, and then stick them in mason jars full of water so that root systems have a chance to grow. Then it wants me to plant them into a container or directly into the ground.
But I'm wondering: can I skip the mason jar step and just build a "Sweet Potato" tower and plant these sweet potatoes the same way I'm planting the Yukons and Russets?
My hope here is that I can just build a small tower for the sweet potatoes, where a wooden post keeps a cylindrical wire-mesh container upright, and I fill it with layers of straw, growing medium and my sweet potatoes which now have long purplish slips begin to form leaves.
Is this a possibility or do I need to pick the slips off and place them into mason jars as the Dengarden article suggests? And if so, how do I know when they are ready to be picked off and placed in the jars? Thanks in advance for any-and-all help!
