Purple Japanese sweet potato (2 SLIPS) Also known as Hawaiian Purple Sweet Potato

Description

Grow your own sweet potatoes at home with Purple Japanese sweet potato slips, also known as Hawaiian purple sweet potatoes. These plants produce elongated tubers with deep purple skin and a light-colored interior, known for their naturally sweet, dense texture when cooked. Ideal for home gardens, raised beds, or larger containers, they offer a productive and space-efficient way to grow a staple root vegetable. Sweet potatoes grow from slips (young rooted cuttings) and thrive in warm conditions with full sun and well-draining soil. Once established, the vines spread across the soil surface, helping suppress weeds while developing tubers beneath. With proper care and a long, warm growing season, you can harvest homegrown sweet potatoes that store well and can be used in a variety of meals. Review: How to grow these cuttings, an experiment I did so you don't have to. - ***Edited to add: It's now the year after I received my cuttings from this seller. The cuttings which were sent to me were not Okinawan sweet potatoes--they were regular, orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. There was no way for me to know this until they'd had an entire season to grow and be harvested of course, and now I've been unable to contact the seller and any protection I may have had on my purchase through desertcart has expired a long time ago. I've added a picture of what I saw when I cut one of my "Okinawan purples" open. Buyer beware. When I received my slips in the mail, I was a bit perplexed. They looked nothing like the picture, there were no leaves, little to no roots, and the stems looked more like cuttings off an adult plant than slips off a tuber. The seller had kindly included two extra cuttings (I ordered four, got six) which was nice. And it doesn't really matter whether these were slips or cuttings, since sweet potatoes can be propagated from stem cuttings just as well. However I had no idea how to do this, and there were no instructions accompanying the cuttings. My first dilemma was, should I freshen up the cuttings before I put them in water or not? So I decided to snip half the cuttings to just under the next leaf/root node and leave half the cuttings untouched. I put all six into water cups of their own and set them in a south facing window which got lots of sun. Four days later two of the cuttings (one snipped, one as shipped) had shriveled up and died, and I had a discussion with another gardener who suggested I should pot them directly in soil rather than water. So I took one of the surviving cuttings from each group and put it in moist potting soil. I now had one snipped cutting in water, one snipped cutting in soil, one "as shipped" cutting in water, and one "as shipped" cutting in soil. Nine days after that, I had my winner. The first leaves of my experiment showed up on the "as shipped" in soil cutting! 6 days after that, the snipped in soil and snipped in water both put out tiny leaves. Now this experiment is far from scientific. My specimen numbers are way too small, and my "in soil" cuttings did spend four days in water. But from the fact that the "as shipped" cutting made leaves at all-- let alone first--I think we can conclude that freshening up the cut on the mailed cuttings is not necessary. And it would seem that potting soil did better than water, so just pop those babies in some moist potting soil when they arrive and set on a sunny window (out of reach of your pet or toddler, if you have one)! All of my surviving cuttings are showing beautiful root development, so it may be that they'll thrive no matter what I do to them. I'm going to continue the experiment for my sake and may edit this post with further results if that's possible. Review: I just want Japanese purple sweet potatoes - The slips were delivered many days later than expected and they were slimy slippery and wilted almost, washed planted anyhow but zero success. Id like a replacement order to be delivered in a timely fashion. Please. See my next review pllllease