How to grow a sweet potato vine from a sweet potato

Organisations like the IMF often publish statistics about the world economy, country GDP’s and so on. I have become sceptical of these statistics because I often find they oversimplify the situations and are one-dimensional. The one that gets me the most is the number of people in the world that live under a dollar a day. It sounds bad that there are people who spend less than a dollar a day for all their needs especially when you live in a place like Bermuda where the cheapest loaf of bread retails for at least four dollars. These statistics often do not tell of how in many rural places in Africa people can pick fruit in the forests or that they do not have to pay for water or that there alternate forms of entertainment that do not require electricity.

Many subsistence farmers do not buy a lot of seeds for their crops. They harvest the seeds at the end of the season to be used for the next season. This method works well for stone fruits, legumes, squashes, leafy vegetables and melons. For sweet potato, people collect the vines and plant them in the garden for use in the next season. So it is possible to have your food without paying money for it.

I have wanted to grow a sweet potato vine but could not find one until I discovered I could start my own vine with just a sweet potato. Which totally makes sense because a sweet potato is a root!

To start your own vine you will need:

• 1 sweet potato
• container
• 3 toothpicks or small wood sticks

To start growing your vine, insert the toothpicks about 2/3 mark of your sweet potato. Place the sweet potato in the container and pour some water.

I took this picture after three days and if you look closely you can see the roots and vines.

After a couple of days, I could see the roots and vine.

I took this picture last week.

The vine keeps growing, I intend to keep some of it in water and plant some of it in my containers. I will probably see if I can cook the leaves when I have plenty as well.