Reed's Sweet Potatoes grown as annuals from true seed

Wow, what fun to see all of them up close, great video!

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Well that was mighty fun to hear you and see a portion of your garden. Thanks for the video!

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A self climbing vine could also be attractive for gardeners with limited space or for disease prevention because of the more pronounced air movements around the foliage compared with plants that crawl on the ground.

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I love the idea of a climbing sweet potato, especially if it flowers a lot. Then I could put it on my fence as a beautiful edible ornamental. :smiley:

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Very interesting

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Thanks!

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Thanks for the video!

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Thanks for the video!



I have one culinary sweet potato plant that is starting to bloom prolifically here in Kentucky. I wonder if I could be so bold as to hope I might get some seeds :crossed_fingers: Thank you for sharing your work with sweet potatoes so that I would even be aware that such a phenomenon could be useful!

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Inspired by you Mark, I got to harvest the first of my seed grown sweet potatoes! Even as I transplanted it from the pot to the garden it had already formed a little tuber whereas none of the others had. My hope was to get a shorter season variation of the okinawa purple sweet potato with white skin and purple flesh, but light purple skin and purple flesh still makes me happy:)

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Just creating the diverse pool of genetics, with seeds that create plants that readily flower and produce more seed, is valuable. I know selection and maintenance of useful lines can be difficult, but I would argue that the availability of the initial pool is the greatest barrier for most people.

I hear this same lament from the true garlic seed people, and I used to hear it a lot from the corn breeders, potato breeders, and others before they became more popular. “I did a lot of work to recover fertility, crossed a lot of stuff to get diversity, and then made selections, but the selections weren’t that great.” At that point, it seems that a lot of non-institutional breeders simply dump all the stuff that doesn’t seem promising. And that happens again and again with different people until grexes and/or wide crosses get distributed broadly so that more people can get involved in selection, or until enough people find things that are worthy of practical use and release them so that those narrow sets of genetics become accessible to amateur and casual breeders who can leverage the increased fertility against other people’s lines.

Institutional programs, of course, keep everything that demonstrates some useful trait, even if the product itself is not useful. Building up a library of genetic material that has various traits so that they can eventually be bred together in an intentional program of directed development is the work of decades, and because of that investment the lines are jealously guarded. Everyone has to do the same work over again to create their own bank of material.

It seems like a real shame that we can’t produce open access versions of the same.

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You know what? It seems to me that creating open access to diverse pools of genetics is exactly the purpose this community was made to facilitate. :smiley:

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Do you have seeds from your plants? I don’t really care what specific traits the parents had, as I would gladly put in the hard work to get the results from seeds for what I would like to do . I have been searching for two years for sweet potato seeds.

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Also if you decide to sell clones soon, I am game. I understand that you need to make money for your efforts, so it will be my pleasure to help.

Is there a storage out there for sweet potato seeds I like to try growing some in grow bags

When / where are you going to be selling them? I’m interested.

I’m also very interested, though I’d rather have tuber lines, regardless of present quality, because of the genetic pool. Still, will watch and likely purchase anything you release for experimenting with.

Very understandable. You should be moving at whatever speed makes sense to you at the time. If it takes you several more years, we’ll probably all still be interested then. :slight_smile:

I’m curious how you use sweet potato flour? It seems like a good use of the extra harvest

I think I used it in combination with spelt or rye for brownies. It can be used in any sort of bicarbonate-leavened baked item can or pancakes. Not sure what 100% would look like. I remember the purple sweet potato flour added a nice depth of flavor and slight floral notes to the brownies. Likely it can be used in yeast-leavened breads too at a small percentage.

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