I’m still in the process of learning to like sweet potato greens. They don’t taste bad, but I think they have a have weird soapy feeling. Not bad raw in small amounts in a salad and I’ve found a couple of recipes I’m going to try. One source I found says dried and powdered leaves make a good thickener for gravies, I tried that and the result was kind of so so but I think it might have potential. I discard tons of greens every year, if dried leaves have uses in the kitchen that could be a game changer in how I look at them.
Edible leaves is a big plus though for people that do like them and know how to use them. If you have a nice warm sunny window or live in a warmer climate you could have a pretty flowering houseplant and fresh greens, all the time.
I can understand that. I have found I really like kang kong, but sweet potato leaves haven’t really appealed to me. They’re okay, just . . . kang kong is better. If I found a way to eat sweet potato greens that I really enjoyed, though, that would be awesome. I could harvest all those leaves to eat right before the first frost killed them off in the fall!
I was reviewing some old documents from back when I did all the research on sweet potatoes and found one where the University of Hawaii had a cooperative breeding program with the nation of Tonga. It’s old and some of what it presents isn’t correct, but I just happened on a paragraph where it said the Tonga growers did not like varieties that climb. It said the stems were very thin and it was difficult to start new plants from cuttings.
Interesting because I certainly never obtained any seeds or plants from Tonga but still Likes to Climb fits that description. The stem is very thin, and I do have to take extra care to take a clipping and root it. Likes to Climb is purely ornamental, outside of course for eating the greens, so I’m not concerned over that.
Just another example I suppose, where traits like purple roots or climbing habit show up, even though none of the germplasm I started with had those traits.
That paper also claimed to have identified traits that are predictably heritable, even though all traits appear quantitative, with multiple genes being responsible and having to come together in just the right way. I think that is probably true, leaf shape seems to be one of them. In my culinary group the roots may be different colors, have different flavors, different textures, different sizes, the vines may be bushy or sprawling but the leaf shape seems to be settling pretty consistently into a plain heart shape.
That’s really interesting, because I assume leaf shape isn’t one of the things you’ve been selecting for. I wonder if it might be on the same chromosome as a gene (or several genes) that enhance deliciousness in the roots, or something?
I have seen the thin-stemmed vining phenotype in vines I grew out from grocery store sweet potatoes. I took a road trip a couple of years ago and picked up yams and sweet potatoes from several ethnic groceries along the way. Unfortunately I didn’t keep them separated or labeled, I don’t know which of these culinary types had the climbing vine.
I grow sweet potatoes on a very small scale outdoors and indoors. The vining type didn’t do well outdoors, and over the winter it didn’t do well in my indoor setup either. It was substantially less “succulent” in the vines and leaves than the other types. The leaves were also a bit smaller than the other culinary or decorative types I’ve had here.
When the climbing vine died last winter, my conclusion was that the thin vines/less succulent vines were not as able to handle limited watering as the other “succulent types”. They would die back at times when the other sweet potatoes would just go dormant, and I think I just let the climbers get too dry at some point.
This photo is probably not much help, but it does portray both of the two types I’m referring to, together in one pot. It’s hard to tell a difference this way. The vines more in the foreground are the thin, climbing type. I gave this away as an edible houseplant to someone in another part of the state who I don’t have any ongoing contact with, but maybe the climber is still out there growing.
I suppose I just mean this as an affirmation: the climbers do exist, I’ve seen one myself
No, never paid much attention to leaf shape when selecting, not until I noticed they were mostly all the same. Since, I’ve specifically looked for other shapes in plants that I keep for cloning, but they just haven’t shown up. They can have nice roots; they can make lots of seeds and have bushy growth and clump root production, but they have to do it all to be kept for cloning.
I think that may be but even though I’ve seen lots of them over the years I don’t think I can say it for sure.
Yes, they do but they are apparently quite rare as a genotype. And that they are also apparently not strong growing plants it’s no wonder they have been selected against a long time ago.
Likes to Climb did very well outside when it came up from seed in 2023 but nearly died inside over winter. It was probably late July of 2024 before it really recovered and started growing good again. This winter in the warmer, sunnier window and more attention to keeping the spider mites under control it is doing much better. It’s putting on new growth and blooming right now.
In 2023 when I first noticed it’s apparent desire to climb, I put a stick beside it, but it couldn’t really grab on without me helping wrap it around. Last year I made a thin wire trellis, and it was able to wrap around and climb by itself. I changed its name from Tries to Climb, to Likes to Climb.
The leaves are smaller than other plants and the internodes are far apart with two or three flowers at each leaf joint. That makes it a very pretty plant. Most plants that make lots of flowers tend to hide them under the leaves, those with long internodes and fewer flowers put them out on display, I like that.
Huh. So maybe the thin vines are a) less capable of climbing (because of their weight?), and b) more capable of storing water, which would make them more drought tolerant and also make them more heavy. Maybe that’s why the thicker vines root easily and don’t climb?
I don’t think so. Likes to Climb is the only one I’ve ever seen that has such thin vines and the only one that actually does climb. I have seen others that will sort of climb just by growing upward and lean on something like a fence, but you have to help them by weaving the vines through the fence. Any with long vines are easy to trellis that way.
I just realized another phenotype distinction. Most long viners just crawl along the ground but some grow upward for a bit before falling over, those are even easier to trellis but they still don’t actually climb. I noticed Likes to Climb was growing straight up a foot or more and had spiraling growth on the ends like a pole bean will do but it wasn’t able to tightly secure itself to the stick. On thin wire trellis it wrapped tightly and kept growing.
I think sun and shadows of the trellis or whatever is what triggers any vine to curl around something and climb but the thicker stick seemed to confuse it. It had the curly vine tips, but they couldn’t grasp the stick like they do thin wire. What is the difference between a stick the size of an ink pen and a thin piece of wire, heck if I know. Likes to Climb is just a bit of a diva, I guess.
It doesn’t seem logical to me that thin vines would have an advantage in drought tolerance. Seems like thicker ones would be better at storing more water. I think that might be why Likes to Climb is more difficult to propagate from cuttings. They just don’t have the stored water and energy to stay alive and grow new roots, unless the whole cutting is kept in a very humid environment. With most others you can throw a piece on the ground in the hot sun and couple days later, its growing.
So yes, I think the thicker vines are definitely easier to clone but I don’t think the extra weight keeps them from climbing. They don’t have that twisting habit like vines that climb, and even the thickest ones are not as thick as a big climbing bean.
No, I’m just going to cross it with Ms. Bloom and another heavy bloomer to try to make still more nice ornamental types. Maybe someday a nice rooted and climbing variety will show up on its own but the two phenotypes are just so different, I think it would be a real pain the rear to try to merge them on purpose.
Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. If the thick vines don’t have a twisting habit, it’s more than just girth that makes them unlikely to climb.
(Nods.) I agree, I think thick vines are more likely to be drought tolerant. Both because they could store more water in the xylem tissues, and because it seems like there would be less surface area to lose water to transpiration.
P.S. If the two phenotypes are that different, it really does make me wonder if those are two very different ancestral species becoming prominent in the genes. Ipomoea batatas, you mysterious allopolyploid, you!
Hey, out of curiosity, do either Likes to Climb or Miss Bloom have a different leaf shape from what has become normal for your yummy-root-forming population?
Yes, both Likes to Climb and Ms. Bloom have what I call the ivy leaf shape. Ms. Bloom is light green with pink flowers. Likes to Climb has dark purple leaves and much darker pink flowers with darker centers. The third ornamental that I am growing to cross with them has the more common heart leaf shape, same as the yummy root plants. It has darker green/purple leaves and slightly larger flowers.
Ms. Bloom and the unnamed one are both very compact and bushy and both bloom and set lots of seed and they are both self-pollinating. They both also go against the more common phenotype I mentioned earlier in that they hold their flowers above instead of hidden in the foliage. They both also have thicker stems than Likes to Climb and are easier to take clones from.
The purple ivy leaf next to Ms. Bloom is not Likes to Climb, but it has the same leaf type and color. Likes to Climb leaves are smaller too. To the left are heart shape leaved plants saved that winter. One turned out to be a good root producer the next season, the others failed qualifications and went extinct.
Used to be any that made seeds was kept regardless of anything else. Now seeds alone just don’t make the cut.
Those two colors of root on the same plant are fascinating.
Do you think it would be possible to store a root like Miss Bloom’s in a bag in the drawer of the fridge all winter? Is that something you’ve tried before?
No, from everything I’ve read, putting sweet potatoes in the fridge is a bad I idea for lots of reasons. I do have those roots though, I just replated what shows in the video in a small pot and its growing in the south window downstairs right now.
It just now occurred to me put some in the fridge to see if it might induce some kind of mutation. I know from small, discarded ones in the garden they don’t die from cold, as long as they don’t actually freeze. I imagine it is a pipe dream to think it would induce mutation toward cold tolerance but it as experiment I could easily do. I might put a couple in the fridge and see how they compare in a month so, to their non-refrigerated counterparts.
I have another theory that I can’t test. That is maybe what I call ornamental because of small roots might actually make bigger roots if they had longer to do it. That would probably have to be done in a climate where it doesn’t freeze in winter.
I also just thought, maybe this isn’t a mutation. Maybe I jumped to conclusions and it has to do with age instead, the white root is three years old the pink/purple one just grew this year. I should know that when I examine them again at the end of this season.
I was wondering if maybe the ornamental plants will grow large roots if kept alive long enough. Miss Bloom certainly did look like it had roots that could be large enough to eat. Maybe it still forms huge (and tasty?) roots, it just takes longer to do it. It would be super cool if you can store those on a shelf successfully.
I could easily see demand for big roots, even in an ornamental cultivar. I bet a lot of ornamental gardeners would be interested in storing roots of ornamental sweet potato plants on a shelf next to their dahlia crowns.
Yes Ms. Bloom’s roots are technically big enough for food, but a bit bigger would be helpful and much more numerous would be needed to qualify for inclusion in the culinary group. A plant with above ground growth as robust as hers should yield five or six roots, around six to ten ounces each and a lot more if grown in ideal conditions, which I don’t do.
No problem there, just grow the culinary ones and say they are ornamental. Only real difference is most culinary types hide their flowers under the foliage, other than that they are just as pretty. That is probably an easy problem to fix with a few years of selection, I might take a look at that this year.
Purely ornamental though, from what I understand, needs to not make big roots. That way it won’t crowd itself and other plants out of a pot and can be grown in smaller pots like for hanging baskets.
Makes sense. Personally, I think a culinary type that doesn’t hide its flowers would be the best of both worlds, but of course my preferences are food first, ornamentality second.
Although, when it comes to bigger or more prominent flowers in general, don’t those usually correlate with more pollinator visitation, and therefore more crossing? More prominent flowers may be valuable from an ease-of-breeding standpoint, as well.
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