Bedding up the sweet potatoes

  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.

  The next step is making our bed.  We simply place cinder blocks in our garden, making sure the distance between the rows is the correct distance for our storm windows.  We then fill the bottom with a few inches of aged sawdust.  Next, we lay out the sweet potatoes.  They can go fairly close together as the goal is to get a lot of slips in a small area.  We grow about 30 varieties, so we use corn cobs pushed into the sawdust to separate the varieties.  We then cover all the sweet potatoes with 4-6 inches of sawdust, making sure the corncobs are still above the sawdust level.  We then water it well and cover the bed with storm windows.
  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.