You had me at brownies😂 I will def. try that
I have never heard of sweet potato flour, at least not using the roots themselves. You can make a powder from dried leaves and use it as a thickener in stews and the like. It actually works pretty well but it takes quite a bit of it, more than wheat flour and it burns easily. It makes a nice very roux with butter, or beef or chicken fat or best yet turkey fat. Add it just a tiny bit a time to the hot fat or it’s hard to keep it from being lumpy. It makes your dish a darker color, especially the dark purple leaves but it still tastes good.
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What a great idea! And way to use some of all that nutritious greenery.
Wasn’t my idea, but I don’t remember where I learned it. I have a big book of Asian recipes or maybe I saw it on a TV cooking show.
I haven’t updated anything about my sweet potatoes for a while but just posted an update over on the OSSI forum and thought I would share it here as well.
I’ve just now started collecting sweet potato seeds and finding some capsules that have already shattered and dropped seeds. It’s been an odd year in several ways, and I hadn’t even kept the paths clear around the pots. It’s all cleaned up now and I’ve started the process of removing lots of old leaves, which makes finding the seeds a lot easier. The plants themselves being grown in pots aren’t affected by the neglect and tall weeds in the paths and they are looking great. Since I was careful to make sure soil mix and conditions were consistent this year, I should be able to see any differences in production between the various plants.
I think there are nine volunteer plants that came up early enough that I quickly prepared pots for them and added them to the patch. They all look great too with two especially interesting ones with dense bushy growth and lots of seeds forming. Volunteers are all over the place this year with new ones coming up even now. A couple that ended up being left where they sprouted are just as big and vigorous as those I planted.
After making the slips this spring I just pitched the old roots on top of an unused tub of soil where the just kept making more slips. We plated some of them in two spots in the garden. One in quite a bit of shade and one at the other end in full hot sun. They are all from the same two clones and those in the shade, even without any watering all year look fantastic. Those in full sun and also without watering look ok but are about 1/2 the size of the shade ones. The primary patch is in full sun but has been watered regularly. I’ve thought before that sweet potatoes might be happier in some climates with a bit of shade, and this seem to support that. Makes it easier to take care of because you don’t have to be so attentive to watering.
I think that selecting for the clump root trait and bushy habit along with growing in pots is the way to go with sweet potatoes because it makes harvest so easy. Although they are every easy to trellis so a larger vine, as long as it has clump root does fine too. A tree branch with some side branches stuck in the ground works fine. I’m also more and more convinced that the pots don’t have to be really large. I’ve had good harvests in 3-gallon pots and those I’m using this year are 7.5 gallons.
I have roots from last year that are still good to eat so I know that they easily store for a full year without much effort. I took some to work and used the postage scale, and they averaged about 8 ounces. That’s the range I’m hoping for because each one makes for a nice serving. I’ll see if the improved conditions this year makes bigger roots or more roots, I hope it makes more. I’ll find out in another month or so.
I had resolved to take lots of pictures and videos this year, and I have taken some but haven’t processed and sorted them yet. I’ll definitely be taking lots of the harvest and the whole patch is more much photogenic now that the paths are cleaned up.
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I question came up over on another thread about my sweet potatoes but thought I’d put my answer here.
From what I’ve seen all phenotypical traits are widely variable and unpredictable. I’ve never selected for or against any particular color or shape in the leaves but as a general rule those with variegated color either white/green and maybe pink or with two or three shades of green are less robust and sort of select themselves out. The odd bronze color is the same, they just don’t measure up to those with solid green or purple leaves of whatever shade. Japanese beetles have never been a serious problem for me, but they certainly do prefer the purple leaves over green.
I recognize several of those pictured on that website. They are commonly grown by the folks that decorate the streets in a town down the road from me and I keep an eye on them for curiosity’s sake, but I don’t grow them, partly because I see an occasional bloom and they are patented so I don’t want to risk them crossing with mine. I have permission from one of the primary university breeders to trial some of his and see if I can obtain seeds from them, but it was verbal rather in in writing, and I decided against it. Supposedly it is OK to sexually breed with a patented clone, without permission but I don’t want to take any chances, even with permission. Plus, I don’t need them as my “ornamentals” are vastly superior in my opinion because mine bloom, a lot, not just once in a while.
For the first several years I focused on almost nothing except the ability to produce true seeds. Then I shifted to other preferred culinary traits. The only difference between ornamental and culinary by my definition is that the ornamentals don’t have to make large storage roots. In fact, it is preferred so that they can be grown in decorative displays without pushing themselves and other plants out of the container.
Focusing on my preferred culinary qualities has led primarily to a simple, what I call heart shaped leaf, without lobes in a range of color form light green to dark purple, tending toward the purple. In the last three or four years I have become more interested in my ornamental line because I think they have better chance of yielding a financial return. It seems people more readily shell out money for decorations than for food.
I have two clones now that are particularly interesting. One I call Ms. Bloom is bushy with light green fingered leaves and massive blooming. The other I’m calling, Likes to Climb, it is the only one I’ve ever seen that actually climbs like a bean vine does rather than just growing up and leaning on something. It has dark purple finger leaves and a single large dark purple flower at each leaf joint. Its flowers are on long stems that stick out between long internodes instead of buried under lots of thick foliage. It’s just flat out pretty. Likes to Climb isn’t very robust though. Without storage roots to clone it has to be kept as a house plant over winter and it didn’t tolerate that as well as most do. It nearly died and took a long time to resume growth this spring.
Now I run two separate, semi-isolated projects. One for colorful and massively blooming plants that don’t make storage roots at all, or at least not large ones, and one for production of nice sized and tasty roots. In the last couple of years, I began noticing the flowers variety and thinking I might be able to select for variety in flower size and color. In the culinary line I’m after roots, so I let them decide what the leaves and flowers look like.
The only foreign ornamental I’ve ever seen that I might be interested in, assuming I could get permission in writing, grows in the landscaping on the campus of Indiana University. It has black and I do mean black leaves. The lobes are so thin and long they look like skinny fingers. I’ve never seen anything like it, even in pictures found in research and nobody there seems to know where it came from. I’ve never seen it bloom though so even if I had a start and permission, it wouldn’t do much good.
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Interesting that the Japanese beetles prefer purple sweet potato leaves. I’ve noticed that with the pole beans I’m trialing; the purple-stemmed varieties are much more attractive to the beetles, which is too bad, because they seemed to germinate and grow much quicker in the spring. But the green varieties later surpassed them due to the level of beetle damage.
I wonder what it is about the purple plants that attract them. I wonder if it holds true for other kinds of plants? I wonder if the purple color and the attractiveness to beetles can be genetically uncoupled, or if they are one and the same thing.
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I went out and made a little video to catch up on updates about my sweet potatoes.
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I know this is not the same as what you described, but have you heard of the Manihi “Treasure Island” sweet potato? Its leaves are close to black in color, and I don’t think it’s patented.
Also, there is the Flora Mia Black sweet potato vine. It looks a little closer to your description, but it may be patented.
Jerry Irving
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I think it makes sense that the ones that show the recessive traits are less hardy. If I understand correctly then sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatas) are 6x ploidy. You have to narrow the gene pool more and more, the more the ploidy is, to get successive matches for the same recessive gene. Each time the population gets more homogeneous. But we don’t know what genes are being lost.
If I remember right, they don’t even all have the same ploidy level which is just one of the several things that make them more than a bit screwy. One thing for sure they don’t follow Mendelian genetic rules. There seems to be no such thing as a simple one or the other dominate/recessive trait. Everything expresses in degrees. I don’t remember the plant witches’ term for that, but collections of genes go into making a trait. I suppose individual genes within a collection may have a dominate/recessive nature but since it takes the whole collection to make the trait identifying a single one and selecting for or against it is way above my pay grade.
So, I just select for what I can see, and I made up the term genetic distillation where I just try to cross good ones to good ones. It’s working but slowly, they are so screwy that even two seeds from the same self-pollinated capsule may yield different phenotypes. I wouldn’t believe that if I hadn’t seen it and I don’t even try to understand it.
I don’t worry much at all about what genes might be lost. You can’t lose much more genetics than by cloning and that is what seems to always have been done with sweet potatoes. I’ve never heard of anyone else trying to turn them into a seed grown annual. They just find a good one and clone it from then on, they don’t care if it even blooms.
I guess to make my annual grown sweet potatoes I am actually trying to reduce heterozygosity, but not as much as just making a new clone. Just enough that any particular seed has a high probability of producing a plant with preferred traits.
A professor I talk to once in a while gets a big kick out of it. He laughs and says, “good luck with that” then he asks me a question and I laugh and say, “why do you care, it’s never going to work anyway”.
But my seeds sprout without sulfuric acid baths, they make three or five pounds of sweet potatoes, they bloom and make more seeds, from seeds, in 100 days or less and now they grow wild.
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I think your sweet potato project is really one of the most valuable things going on in the GtS world! I hope that one day I will be able to build on what you’ve done to breed sweet potatoes for Colorado.
Guess what?! One of my sweet potatoes has been flowering every day for a month, and it’s had immature seed pods on it for awhile, and I checked it today, and . . . the first seed pod was ready for harvesting!
I pulled it off and found there were eight nice black seeds inside. My very own true sweet potato seeds. And there was only one plant in that area, and it’s the only sweet potato I know of in my whole neighborhood that has flowered this year, so it must be self-fertile.
I popped those seeds into the soil all over my greenhouse immediately. I’m gonna try to breed my population to become a year-round perennial groundcover in my greenhouse, with roots I can harvest whenever the whim strikes. 
'Cause why not?
Thank you so much for inspiring me to want to try, @MarkReed! Your project made me really excited about the idea.
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That is exciting but are you sure it’s a sweet potato and not some other ipomoea species? There are only four chambers in a sweet potato capsule, if not all get pollinated or some abort you can have as few as one, but I’ve never seen more than four.
Still, not completely impossible I suppose, as they can do very odd things. For example, normal number of cotyledon leaves is two, but three isn’t all that uncommon and I’ve seen as many as five. I think the odd numbers of cotyledons may be due to them not all having the same ploidy level and when different ones cross weird things can happen. My level of understanding of genetics is a bit too shallow though for anything but a guess.
Or maybe the flower was fasciated, I think that is the term when a stem or flower is doubled. Maybe if that happened, as it once in a while does with the stems, it ended up with a double capsule and both produced all four seeds. I’ve never seen it on a flower though, that I recall.
@Lowell_McCampbell, I think I got the sweet potato slips from you. Do you grow any other morning glory species?
@MarkReed, I’ll describe the plant, and you can tell me if it sounds like a sweet potato. I hope so. Now you’ve gotten me very curious.
There were four chambers inside the capsule, and each contained two seeds. The capsules and seeds looked the same as bindweed capsules and seeds, just significantly larger.
The flowers are dark purple, and the leaves are heart-shaped and medium green. It’s been putting out a new flower every day for about two months, sometimes two, three, or even four flowers in one day. Not all of those flowers have set seed pods, but about half of them have. It’s clearly self-fertile, since there are no other flowering morning glories in my neighborhood (except for bindweed).
If more of those capsules fully ripen, I can report back about how many seeds the rest have. If the rest all have four or fewer, we can guess it was a mutation in that specific flower. If the rest have more than four, it has to be genetic: maybe I have the wrong species? Or maybe this particular cultivar of sweet potato is unusually productive at making seeds? Obviously, I would prefer the latter. 
I can also report back about the shape of the cotyledons of the seedlings, if that seems like it would be relevant. Sweet potato cotyledons are supposed to look like > <, right? Would that also be true of any inedible lookalike species I should be aware of?
A possibility that occurs to me is that maybe drought has flipped something epigenetic. Does that seem possible? I watered it well in May, June, July, and August (a nice thorough drenching about three times a week), but during September, I’ve barely watered it at all. The plant has continued to do fine despite that, which I think I should probably credit to whatever fungus has taken over the deep wood chip mulch around it and grown loads of mycelia through it.
I will note that it hasn’t grown very vigorously – the vine’s only about four feet long, and it stopped making new leaves entirely after I stopped watering it regularly. But it has kept on flowering daily for about two months, and the leaves are still green.
(My suspicion is that it won’t give me much in the way of roots to eat this fall, but that’s no big deal – I’m planning to dig it up and move it into my greenhouse right before the first frost to see how it does in moist soil above freezing all winter.)
Wow, odd numbers of cotyledons is interesting! Does that seem to confer an advantage to the seedlings? I wouldn’t be surprised if having more leaf area to start photosynthesizing younger in life would be a good thing.
All of the ipomoea species I have seen which isn’t more than four or five, have four chambers and just one seed per. They all look your little < > symbol for the cotyledons but with a lot of variety of it. Batata and pandurata cotyledons look very much alike. All the flowers have that same basic horn shape just different sizes and colors.
It’s fun to think that, but I don’t know enough about epigenetics to say if it’s possible. My guess is it’s pretty unlikely, if for no other reason than the very low mathematical probability of it.
No, the opposite, those generally do poorly. Sometimes the extras sort of like burst out of the stem kind of d splitting it in the process, one here, one there instead of perfectly opposite and the plants never really take off very good. They’re weird, they’re just real weird.
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Which Ipomoea species have you seen seed capsules for? My experience right now is limited to one (Ipomoea batatas, I hope ). I’ve also seen seed capsules for field bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), but that’s not Ipomoea.
My kang kong (Ipomoea aquatica) hasn’t made seeds yet, and I haven’t started bush morning glory (Ipomoea leptophylla) or mecha-meck (Ipomoea pandurata) yet, though I have seeds and plan to. There are a half-dozen other edible Ipomoea species I’m casually considering trying at some point. (I can make a list, if you’re curious.) I’m really interested in Ipomoea costata, but I haven’t seen anywhere in the US that sells seeds of it yet.
(Laugh.) Yes, I can see how sweet potato breeding would often produce weird offspring! It’s a shame most of those weirdnesses result in plants that do poorly, but that’s how mutation and wide crosses usually go.
I keep wondering if Ipomoea batatas is actually a species complex, rather than a single species.
Wiki says there are over a thousand species in the Convolvulaceae family with ipomoea having the most and that “whose current taxonomy and systematics are in flux”. Whatever the heck that means.
I’ve seen pandurata, quamoclit, tricolor, although more than one goes by that name, aquatica, purpurea and of course lots of batatas. Quamoclit has crazy little fern looking leaves, but they all have the similar < > cotyledons, flower structure and all with four seeds per capsule.
I have a big pile of info and research that I printed from the internet several years ago, but it’s mostly just an interesting read, not much actionable advice or hints on growing them from seed. There is a bit of contradiction in it too, which is understandable I guess because it covers about a hundred years and from two or three continents.
The only other species that really caught my attention is pandurata because it is supposedly edible, it’s perennial and it grows wild in my neighborhood but messing with it would be a huge and very long-term undertaking. I just don’t have the time, space and patience for it. Batatas is screwy enough by itself, an interspecies cross I suspect would be even more so.
Without digging into that pile for reference, just by memory, as I recall batatas originated somewhere in northern South America about 5000 years ago from a natural interspecies cross. But the plant authorities don’t seem to know that for sure. They also don’t know what two species were involved or if it was just two, it may have been three. And it may have happened independently, more than once, so I guess it could be called a species complex. To make it more fun some papers suggested batatas is also naturally transgenic (GMO), having picked up some DNA from a bacterium somewhere along the way that may have enhanced its ability to convert starch in the storage roots to sugar.
All of those maybes, and may haves seem to go along with Wikipedia’s “whose current taxonomy and systematics are in flux” statement. That’s regarding the whole family but batatas seems to me to have plenty of flux all by itself.
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Ipomoea is certainly an intriguing genus!
I got intrigued by Ipomoea leptophylla and Ipomoea pandurata after reading about them in Sam Thayer’s Field Guide of Edible Wild Plants. Although his description of the latter, that it “tends to excite the imagination more than the palate,” is certainly a bucket of water on early excitement. (Laugh.) Still, I’d like to give them a try. It sounds like the roots can be pretty good when they’re small, and I’m wild about the idea of highly drought tolerant vegetables.
These are the two most interesting articles I’ve found online about edible morning glories (which I’m sure you’ve already read):
http://www.nomadseed.com/2017/12/mecha-meck-the-wild-sweet-potato-vine-ipomoea-pandurata/
The other species I’m currently interested in are Ipomoea costata, Ipomoea simplex, Ipomoea alba, Ipomoea tuba, Ipomoea macrantha, Ipomoea plummerae, Ipomoea lacunosa, and Ipomoea macrorhiza. There are a heck of a lot more Ipomoea species out there that seem to be easy to find seeds of because they’re popular ornamentals, but I can’t find any information about the edibility of those species, so “Eh!” My fascination with botany tends to wander away whenever the plants are inedible. (Laugh.)
I’m particularly interested in Ipomoea costata because it’s native to an arid climate, and it sounds like it has been a popular food for indigenous people in Australia. That implies the roots taste good, and can get big with little water. That would be a really cool plant. (If somebody out there has tasted it, I’d love to hear your opinion. )
Wow, Ipomoea batatas does seem to have some crazy things in its history! It would be fun if researchers can figure out what species likely crossed to create that species (complex?). Backcrossing Ipomoea batatas with some of its wild ancestors could result in new traits to play with, some of which might be desirable.
Whatever species Ipomoea batatas arose from must have been native to northern South America. Do we know which other edible Ipomoea species are native to that general region?
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One possibility is that you accidentally duplicated the natural growing conditions. Some areas do narurally have summer rains and fall drought. If that is the case you may have accidentally triggered the natural seed mechanism for the plant, resulting in a full seed load.