In all the years we’ve made a garden we’ve only grew sweet potatoes twice. One time ages ago my Uncle Henry gave me some sweet potato slips. He had extra and wanted to share them with us. I’m sure he asked Pap first but for some reason Pap and Granny never did grow sweet potatoes even though they loved them.
The ones Uncle Henry shared with us were the orange variety and they did okay, although our soil wasn’t near as good in those days as it is today.
Pap and Granny especially loved white sweet potatoes. You rarely see them, or at least you don’t in our area. When I was a girl one of Pap’s friends grew them and he would share his bounty with us.
Our local produce stand, Peachtree Produce, does have white sweet potatoes sometimes. Granny and I always check to see if there’s any there when we stop by to get something.
This year I ordered White Bonita sweet potato slips. I didn’t know anything about them but liked the name because my aunt’s middle name is Bonita.
Even with the dry weather the vines really took off. We watered them heavily just after planting, and then sporadically the rest of the summer.
The vines grew out all sides of the raised bed and started growing on the ground.
We harvested the sweet potatoes last week and was very surprised to see a few red ones. They look like the Beauregard variety but I’m not sure what they are. The Deer Hunter teased that whoever put together the slips we ordered must have been related to the person he lived with that mislabeled his Cherokee Purple tomatoes last year 🙂
A commenter said the sweet potato vines are very nutritious and can even be used medicinally. I was not aware of that.
Earlier in the summer we grabbled out a couple of white potatoes and ate them, they were tasty! I can’t wait to enjoy the rest of them. I’m sure the red ones will be good too.
Tipper
Subscribe for FREE and get a daily dose of Appalachia in your inbox
I have commented too much today, but here I go again. When I was growing up mother would make something from sweet potatoes that she would call a sweet potato soufay. I know that is not the correct spelling but that is the way she pronounced it. Instead of using pecans for a topping she would used marshmallows and sometimes mix raisins in with the potatoes. I loved this. Daddy would and could make mighty good sweet potato pies. Grandmother and Mother would also make deep dish juicy cobbler pies using sweet potatoes. Their cobbler pies would not only be juicy but have dumplings (dough balls) in them.
After moving to central Texas, we found that we could not get the kind of sweet potatoes we grew up with in NC. They were not sweet; they were often stringy. We rarely buy them here.
On of my sisters-in-law grew up in Sampson County, near Clinton. Her dad farmed as did his brothers and her mother’s brothers. When she heard us talking about the poor quality of the ones we get here, she shipped a bushel of Sampson County sweet potatoes to us. I don’t know what variety they were, but I DO know that they were delicious. A bushel is a lot sweet ‘taters for 2 old folks to eat.
We love sweet potatoes around here. I like the skinny white ones. As a kid I remember getting them and putting butter on em and I would eat and eat. Oh , they were so good. I eat any kind, it don’t matter.
Sweet potatoes sure has evoked lots of wonderful memories for folks, hasn’t it? My grandmother loved baked sweet potatoes, usually the red ones, but she also had the white ones, not ones she raised but
probably bought at the local farmers’ market in our town. Sweet potatoes are loaded with potassium
and so good for us!
Thank you all for the comments. You’re my kind of people!
Mom’s favorite thing to plant was Nancy Hall’s white sweet potatoes. I thought they were dry but I find myself liking them more than the red variety as I get older. The last time I planted a ridge, an underground rodent ate a bite out of every tater. I threw them all out and haven’t tried to raise them in a few years.
Y’all harvested some good looking sweet taters! I love to cube them up and roast them with other root veggies and some brussel sprouts. A cozy meal for airish fall days.
I love a good sweet potato. We tried several times to grow them but the deer always ate the slips off to the ground. I’m glad yours did well this year.
Larry, the deer in my neck of the woods create a huge problem with trying to grow anything in a garden. Not only with growing a garden but with the number of wrecks/tore up cars. The SCDNR gives my sweet potato friend a permit to kill deer out of season. There may be a limited number as to how many he can kill. They will only give a permit to the ones that grow crops as a source of income, not to the ones with gardens.
In all my years, I have never seen white sweet potatoes. They look so pretty. I wonder if they are sweeter or more delicate in flavor. I’ve only ever used the red ones for sweet potato pie (which the family always wanted instead of pumpkin).
I find that the white sweet potatoes are noticeably less sweet. I am not much of a “sweet eater” so they are perfect for me.
The white sweet potatoes are sweeter and creamier than the orange has been my experience. Of course, I like both of them. We haven’t grown them but I’m thinking next year, we’ll give it a try.
Your sweet potatoes look good. My daddy grew lots of sweet potatoes and built a little building to keep them during the winter. Other people also paid him to store theirs. It had thick walls, one tiny window for a little light and a small wood stove which he had to keep a fire in throughout the winter. He had a bed for the slips on a hillside which faced east and I remember that he used old sawdust in the soil. I think he sometimes grew enough slips to sell others. He always cautioned us not to drop them into the baskets but to gently lay them in nor handle them too roughly, and to try not to handle them more than necessary. If we were picking some for a family meal he said not to move them around nor to pick through them but to pick the ones on top or they wouldn’t last. It was always fun to find a big one like you have but I don’t remember one that big. You and Matt win the prize for that one! As we dug them I remember him peeling a skinny one down almost to the end, leaving a place on the very end to hold with our dirty fingers so that we could have a snack. I think he grew Beauregard mostly. I don’t remember ever seeing a white one. He liked to use the tall bushel baskets and they sat on boards that made frames to keep the baskets off the floor of the potato house and allow air circulation. I still have my grandmother’s small square aluminum pan she used to bake sweet potatoes in the oven. It had become black long before I remember. She would rub them with bacon grease before baking. We ate them baked, mashed with marshmallows on top and candied. All this is making me hungry! Another use for the potato house was to warm and dry newborn baby lambs when he had sheep. Somehow they were usually born on the coldest January nights. He would get up several times during the night to check the ewes. The newborn babies would be wrapped in tow sacks (burlap bags), put into a bushel basket and brought to the warm potato house until they were dry and ready to go back to their mom at the barn. Tipper, you have really stirred up some memories! Thanks again. Your warm basement should be a good place to store sweet potatoes if you can set the baskets up off the floor a little and cover with a cloth to keep dark. That is, if they aren’t soon all eaten. Enjoy!
I love reading your memories of your daddy, the potatoes and the little lambs. My grandfather was a sustenance farmer in NW Georgia and I grew up in the city of Atlanta. I spent much of my childhood on the farm where there was a smoke house, potato house, a car shed, blacksmith shop, spring house and huge barn.
Your potato house story brought to mind how, as a child, I knew the sweet potatoes were stored in the potato house, but I did not know they were being “cured”. Nor did I know that was a common practice until we were in the N. GA or NC mountains in recent years and I saw a tiny brick or rock building with a sign that said “potato house”. So I googled it and learned my grandfather’s potato house was necessary for curing the potatoes. Grandmother would whip up a sweet potato pie when we showed up or just always had one out on the stove top, just in case. They did not have a phone until the mid-late sixties, so company just showed up unannounced. You could hear a vehicle approaching from a mile or two away on the gravel road, so Grandmother would meet you on the porch, wiping her hands on her apron that she wore over her cotton house dress.
I never learned about “slips” and I don’t recall picking the sweet potatoes. Hmmm…I guess I’ll google that now! But I love to eat sweet potatoes and I bake them and sometimes mash them in a boiler and add butter, brown sugar, coconut and pecans, like a quick stove top casserole, minus the marshmallows.
My grandfather, Blue, used the warm potato house in winter to crack black walnuts with a tool, take naps where he could have some privacy from the four rambunctious city kids, and stored other tools needed as the blacksmith shop was just out the door of the potato house.
Tipper, your posts always evoke wonderful memories for me. Thank you.
God bless all the W NC citizens who have been affected by the tragic flooding. My prayers continue for all who have lost loved ones. My goodness, I can’t imagine your sorrow. May God meet you in your grief.
Vicki Davis, NW Georgia
I remember when a lot of the older farmers would have a potato bed filled with rotten sawdust and would grow their own slips. Mother would place a sweet potato in a pan with a little bit of water on the mantle over our fireplace. It would grow a vine around the fireplace that was sorta like having flowers in our home.
We like sweet potatoes but 2-3 hills would make us a year’s supply. We buy them at our local farm market where they are labeled as “Mississippi Red” (which I suspect are Beauregard.) I can say this from sad experience – dig them before it frosts on the vines or they will rot! And deer absolutely love the vines. I had never seen such truly white potatoes as in your picture. What I have always called white ones are really tan, more like the non-sweet potatoes.
We have never grew sweet potatoes and neither did my parents. My mama always made sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving and Christmas only. She always just opened up a big can and cooked them with brown sugar and butter. They were very good to me. She never realized just how wonderful fresh sweet potatoes are until she was in her 50’s. I had made fresh ones for dinner and after eating them, she has never bought a can again. If we can expand our garden fence, I would love to plant some next year.
It was raining here earlier, when I looked out the window and saw huge snowflakes pouring from the sky. They were so beautiful and lasted about ten or fifteen minutes. My daughter-in-law said the girls were super excited—I am sure they were jumping up and down in front of their window. I am so happy we went to the garden in the rain yesterday and picked all the peppers that were left. Have a great day everyone!
One year we ordered a variety of 5 types of sweet potato slips from a farm in Tennessee. We wanted to see which grew better on our land and which we liked best. We even tried a Japanese variety which was purple skinned but didn’t plant that kind again as it didn’t store well and had very high sugar content; it is even used in ice cream flavoring in Japan and they are proud of that variety; it is their national sweet potato!
In the end we liked two varieties best: O’ Henry, which I suspect is the white sweet potato found in the mountains at produce stands, and a red variety cultivated by NC State University called Covington. O’ Henry has the yellow flesh when cooked and a slightly nutty taste; I love it with beef dishes! Covington gives good uniform sized tubers with a good taste; both varieties stored well in a cooler place though, alas!, we have no root cellar as our wise ancestors would have had. My advice would be to order a variety of slips and see which grow best on your land and with best taste and store well. We had also planted a bush type and that one didn’t produce good tubers in our dense clay soil. There are a great number of varieties and some are sure to please your palate!
Mary, I think it is safe to say around here (Greenville, SC) and with my sweet potato friend, either Covington or Beauregard are the most popular. In the past centennial was a favorite variety. My uncle was a county agriculture agent and would tell Daddy to mix Borax in with the fertilizer when we were setting out our sweet potatoes back in the 60’s. I was a kid and never knew the reason for doing this.
I apologize for the mistakes in my first comment especially in that one sentence.
My daddy always raised sweet potatoes. Sometimes red and sometimes white. Always loved my mom’s sweet potato pies and sweet potato fried pies.
You know I won’t eat the oranges ones and only you know why, but I love the white ones. I prefer them baked, allowed to get cold, peeled and eaten like a lollipop. No butter, no nothing, just tater.
Ask Granny if her preference for the white ones are the same as mine! Double dare you!
When growing up we would plant about 500 sweet potatoes slips a year. Daddy would sell or give some away to others, but keep most of them for our own use. My produce selling friend plants around 25 to 30 thousand each year, it is his main money crop. He is now selling to the ones he grew his year. One of my daughter’s coworker friends would bring and give her white sweet potatoes. She would get them for her when she went to see her mother in Johnson City, Tenn. My daughter loved them. Anyone remember when the old farmers would store there sweet potatoes out in the field in “houses” made from cornstalks, dirt, leaves or pine needles and then cover this with old tin to help keep out the rain? Later on, the high schools started having “potato houses” to store the farmer’s sweet potatoes during the winter months.
Didn’t know the sweet potato vines were medicinal. Always good to learn something new. Saw the video where you harvested the sweet potatoes, I think that big red one alone would feed the family.
Tipper how do you think white sweet potatoes would be in your sweet potatoes you make at the holidays, which by the way I’ve made and love! I’ve never had a white one but want to try them. Hoping my local farmers market will have some.
Tammye-I’ve never tried them in it but I’m sure they would be delicious too 🙂 Glad you enjoy the recipe too!
The sweet potatoes are beautiful. I’m going to try to grow some. this next year. I have never even heard of white Sweet potatoes!
I have just recently seen white sweet potatoes at a new Lowes Foods. I did not know there was such a variety but will have to try them. That picture of sweet potatoes looks really good and that one big one is bigger than your hand! Your Deer Hunter doesn’t miss a beat, that’s funny : )
Happy happy joy joy! That’s some mighty fine eat’n there!!! Hope ya’ll enjoy! Ya’ll have a great day.
I love a sweet potato. Roasted with Brussels sprouts is one of my favorite ways to eat them but I’ve got a few baked ones in the fridge right now waiting to be used up. I’ve never grown them either but I would like to. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a white one!
I sure wish I lived closer to Nashville to actually meet you two. Seeing the video you and Matt did on harvesting your sweet potatoes is gonna put me on a search to find where to purchase the slips and grow some myself. We have been growing white and red potatoes and regular sweet potatoes . I can’t wait to find the slips for next year. As always, prayers for Granny and God’s Blessing on your growing family.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen or had white sweet potatoes before.
Matt sure has a great sense of humor…or you do to put up with him.
We just had Thanksgiving here yesterday because on Canada they have it in October. I also do the real one in November too.
Hope you have a wonderful day!
God Bless!!
well thank you for sharing the information tipper that the vines of the sweet potato are medicinal, I never knew that Good thing to know