Sprouting a sweet potato

This is my first blog post in a while. Having started a new job at the beginning of October I've been getting into a new routine and the last few weeks seem to have flown by. But while watering a few dry spots on my windowsill today I noticed how well the sweet potato I've been sprouting is coming on and felt compelled to write about it. My partner is trying to fill his large and sunny office windowsills with plants while spending as little as possible, so I've been trying to grow all sorts of interesting edibles from scratch. Apparently, you can eat the leaves and young shoots of sweet potato plants so even if we don't get any tubers we'll still have something to munch on.

As the nights are starting to draw in and temperatures are getting colder it may seem an odd time of year to be growing a sweet potato, being that the plant originates from South and Central America and generally prefers warm growing conditions with plenty of light. However, when I decided to try sprouting a supermarket-bought tuber back in August I was more concerned with whether I could persuade it to produce a shoot than how I would keep it alive through the winter!

After some research on the internet it seemed best to try sprouting the tuber by suspending it in a container of water, pointy end down. I used corn-on-the-cob spikes stuck into the sides of the sweet potato but I think skewers or cocktail sticks would work just as well. I also used an organic sweet potato as I thought it would be less likely to have been treating with some kind of anti-sprouting compound. I read that scrubbing the tuber beforehand can also help to remove any anti-sprouting treatments.

The shape of the tuber and the arm-like spikes I had stuck in its sides made my sweet potato look a bit like  a creature so I gave it some eyes too!

The growth you can see in the picture has taken around two months to develop. Most of that time the tuber was only growing roots, which took a while to get going. Now that leaves have sprouted the growth seems to be more rapid. I now have to decide what to do next - should I just pot up the tuber into one container of compost or slice off come of the shoots and try to get those to root? Maybe I'll do both and write a future post about which works best and whether I can keep the sweet potato alive through the winter.