Sweet potatoes are such a fun, exotic addition to the veggie patch, and they’ve really been having a moment lately! The best part? You can totally grow them in your own backyard. Just make sure you get them out of the ground in the fall before the first frost hits.
Signs Your Sweet Potatoes are Ready for Harvest
Since sweet potatoes do all their growing underground, it can be a bit of a guessing game to figure out when they’re perfectly ripe. To make things trickier, these plants are overachievers—they’ll technically keep growing forever as long as the weather stays warm!
Ideally, you want your sweet potatoes to have firm skin and a deep, consistent color. A great clue for the sweet potato harvest timing is the foliage above ground. Once those leaves start turning a bit yellow, it’s time to grab your shovel. At the very latest, make sure they are out of the garden before the first frost arrives.
Sweet potatoes are slow starters and take their sweet time to develop those big, chunky tubers we love. To give them enough “runway” before winter, get them in the ground by mid-May as soon as the danger of frost has passed.
How to Dig Them Up
If you’re growing sweet potatoes in containers, you’ve got it easy! All you have to do is tip the pot over and sift through the soil to find your prize.
For those growing in garden beds, you’ll want a sturdy garden fork. Try to wait for a dry spell to harvest—it makes things much less messy since the dirt won’t stick to the tubers as much.
Step-by-Step Harvest:
- Trim back the long vines on the surface.
- Use your garden fork to lift the soil, starting a safe distance away from the main stem to avoid stabs.
- Carefully work your way toward the center of the plant.
- Lift the tubers out gently (try not to nick the skin!).
- Brush off the loose dirt by hand.
Storing Your Harvest
You can store sweet potatoes much like regular potatoes—in a cool, dark basement or cellar. A popular trick is to nestle them in a box of sand. Pro tip: Don’t wash them if you aren’t planning to eat them right away! Wait until just before cooking to give them a scrub; they’ll stay fresh much longer that way.
Don’t toss those vine clippings! You can actually grow cuttings from them for next year’s garden. Unlike regular potatoes, we don’t usually plant the tubers themselves to grow new ones. If you plant a whole sweet potato, the plant thinks, “Hey, I’ve already got a huge food storage tank,” and it won’t bother making many new tubers. Rooted cuttings are the way to go!
Propagating sweet potatoes is super simple. Just snip off a vine about 8 inches long and pop it in a glass of water. You’ll see roots sprouting within just a few days! Once they have a good root system, move them into pots and keep them in a cool, bright spot indoors over the winter. If the vines get too leggy during the off-season, just trim them back and start even more cuttings!
