We bedded up our sweet potatoes a few weeks ago. The process actually began last fall when we set aside our sweet potato seed. We choose fairly small, well-shaped and blemish free potatoes then simply put them loose in labeled paper bags or cardboard boxes. We then put them upstairs in our house, which stays fairly warm all winter. This is not ideal for eating potatoes, but for the seed potatoes it works well to get them to start sprouting. Around early April, most of the varieties have about an inch of sprout growth.
It takes quite a bit of monitoring to keep the temperature within a good range for the sweet potatoes. If it is going to be quite cold in the night, we'll add some blankets on top. On sunny days, we take every other window off to vent it or remove the glass altogether. It can get really hot really quickly if the glass is left on and we've accidentally burned sweet potato growth that was even an inch under the sawdust. It is also important to keep it well watered.
From making the bed to having slips to start cutting takes about a month or so. Some varieties are really quick to slip while others are very slow. For the slower ones, we plant extra potatoes to make sure we have enough of that kind at planting time.
After we've cut all the slips we need from the bed, we usually let it keep growing all summer as we cut sweet potato greens from it. They are a delicious cooked summer green. Then in the fall, we clean out the bed, spreading the sawdust on the garden, feeding the old sweet potatoes to the goats and collecting any newly grown sweet potatoes to eat. We often re-use the bed for multiple years, but we always put new sawdust in it every year to prevent any possible disease carry over.
