Sweet Potato Ipomoea Erato Orange

Sweet Potatoes are a healthier, vitamin rich twist on a normal white potato and with their lovely orange flesh and red skin ‘Erato Orange’ will make growing your own produce more interesting and add some delicious, sweet exotic flavours to your cooking. With extra dietary fibre than regular potatoes, they are becoming increasingly popular in everyday diets, they are extremely easy to cook and very versatile and can be mashed, boiled, or baked, made into chips, soups, curries, and stews. Sweet potatoes prefer to grow in hot conditions, preferably a greenhouse or conservatory, they are perfect for growing in pots and with regular watering they will grow to a maximum of around 30cm tall. Vigorous plants, they will develop large tubers in the summer and be ready to harvest from September through to October. Delivered as 6 plug plants, ready to grow on before planting out.

Care Guide

How to grow

Outdoors: If grown outdoors, sweet potatoes need moisture-retentive, free-draining soil, in a sheltered, sunny position (they are particularly happy in organic rich sand).

• Prepare the ground as necessary.
• Use black polythene, to warm the soil and suppress weed growth. Lay the polythene over the soil several weeks before planting, from late March or April as the soil starts to warm up.
• Grow the plants on in a bright, frost-free position in the greenhouse or on a sunny windowsill, until late May until early June, potting on as necessary.
• ?Harden off? before planting outdoors, in slits through the polythene.
• Cover with cloches or fleece ? the temperature lift makes all the difference.

Indoors: Grow sweet potatoes in a glasshouse in large tubs, growing-bags or the glasshouse border, transplanting from the pots once they have produced plenty of roots.

• The foliage can be trained up string, canes or trellis. Any good growing medium is satisfactory, including peat-free types.
• Sweet potatoes crop best at temperatures between 21-26?C (70-80?F).
• Keep greenhouse plants well-watered and feed every other week with a high-potassium liquid feed.
• Overwinter plants in a frost-free greenhouse or windowsill.