Since they were imported, sweet potatoes have been valued both as lush ornamental plants and for culinary use. Growing your own is also pretty straightforward. Why not cultivate two or three plants at once? With the tips on this page, you don't even have to travel long distances to the tree nursery to buy more specimens. If you already have a sweet potato plant, it is possible to multiply it with little effort. Find out how here!
The sweet potato forms roots very quickly in water
Sweet potatoes root incredibly quickly
The sweet potato is a fast rooter. With the right site conditions, it forms the first new shoots after just a few days, so that it can soon be planted in the ground.
The right time
If you want to multiply your sweet potatoes, spring and summer are ideal for this. Then the plant has shoots that are long enough to take offshoots from them.
Different approaches
There are several methods you can use to propagate a sweet potato.
Multiply sweet potatoes with tuber shoots
- Cut off the two ends from a tuber
- allow the interfaces to air dry
- fill a pot with soil and place the cut tuber on top
- place the pot in a warm, bright place at 20°C
- if the new shoots are 10-15 cm long, repot them into individual containers
- the shoots will soon take root in the new pot
Propagate sweet potatoes with unrooted cuttings
- cut off shoots at least 10 cm long from the mother plant
- put them in the ground
- here, too, roots form after a short time
Propagate sweet potatoes with rooted cuttings
- remove offshoots from the mother plant again
- put them in a pot filled with soil
- cover the pot with foil and store it at 20°C (e.g. in the greenhouse)
What else is important?
Even if your sweet potato has already developed roots. you may not put them outside until mid-May. Sweet potatoes are very sensitive to frost and must also have reached a length of about 10-15 cm in order to continue to develop well.