Starting sweet potatoes

To grow sweet potatoes, we plant slips in the garden once the weather outside is consistently warm (around early June for me.)

You can order slips online, or start them yourself from sweet potatoes. I think it is ideal to use sweets that you've grown the previous summer; the next best alternative is to use organic sweet potatoes (those not sprayed with a sprouting inhibitor) that have been grown locally, which I think you can sometimes find at your co-op. 

 I've seen a lot of ways that people start sweets. My method is to suspend them in water in a warm, sunny window months before planting time. I've started them in mid-January before, but it should be fine as long as you get them going before March.

I like using canning jars, but it doesn't really matter what you use. You can use strong toothpicks to hold them up (this is the most common way,) but I have wooden skewers on hand so I broke those off to make them a bit shorter -- two per root. I've never tried using metal or plastic skewers or toothpicks -- I think they would work ok.

I also think it is important to use water with as little chlorine or salt as possible. When I lived in Saint Paul, I'd boil water and let it sit to remove the chlorine. Here is Wisconsin we have well water and a water softener, so I use purchased spring water because I know there is salt in the water. I don't actually know if this matters or not, but I don't want to chance it. (I can say that when I'm making sourdough bread, the starter doesn't want to rise unless I replace the water out of the faucet with purchased spring water.)

And now we wait. It can take a long time, and will probably not work if you have them in a cold or drafty place. The warmer, the better. I'm using orange and purple sweets I grew last year. The specific varieties of each have been lost to the mists of time (and my faulty memory).