Sweet Potato Yield: How Many Plants Does Your Family Need?
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Sweet potatoes are an ideal crop: affordable and easy to grow. With adequate space, you can grow enough yearly supply for your family. But how many sweet potatoes per plant can you grow, and how many plants do you need?
In (most) moderate climates, a single plant will produce three to five sweet potato tubers weighing 3 to 8 ounces each. So, on average, you can expect to harvest around one pound of sweet potatoes for every slip you plant. This yield can be considerably higher in warmer climates with long, hot summers.
Depending on your family’s preferences and other veggie harvests, five sweet potato plants per person should keep you stocked for several months. We’ll go into more detail below, but this should give you enough to enjoy without any going to waste.
The Best Yielding Sweet Potatoes
Like many gardeners, we started growing sweet potatoes by producing slips from store-bought potatoes. Growing potato slips is a fun experiment for home and a great way to get younger children involved in the vegetable plot!
But if you want to guarantee a good yield of this nutritious, sweet-tasting root vegetable, try growing a specific sweet potato cultivar that’s well-acclimated to your climate and growing conditions. These will give better potato yields in home gardens than store-bought potatoes produced in vast agricultural systems.
If you have a range of sweet potato slips to choose from, look out the following high-yielding varieties:
- Centennial – produces tubers with vibrant orange skin and flesh. It’s also a semi-bush variety suited to northern climates, ideal for long-term storage.
- Porto Rico – a compact bush cultivar that produces a high yield in a small space. Porto Rico sweet potatoes have vibrant reddish skin, a creamy pink interior, and a deliciously smooth, sweet flavor.
- Jewel – a popular variety renowned for producing large tubers with orange flesh, giving an impressively big yield per plant.
- Bellevue – the best-producing sweet potato for sandy soils. They’re best eaten a few months after harvest to give the flavor time to develop.
- Beauregard – a fast-growing and yummy cultivar producing vibrant orange tubers with a sweet flavor after 110 days.
How Many Sweet Potato Plants Per Person
If, like us, you’re attempting to grow enough food to be relatively self-sufficient, it helps to try and figure out how many plants of each vegetable crop you need to go. Otherwise, things can go awry! You might have a glut of one garden crop and barely one meal from another!
(Hence why, this year, we harvested enough tomatoes to feed an army but only a tiny handful of chickpeas!)
To determine how many sweet potato plants per person, you first need to guestimate how many each person would eat over a year. Let’s say you eat two sweet potatoes weekly – you would need around 100 yummy sweet potatoes to fulfill this amount. So, you would need to plant 20 slips to produce a year’s supply of sweet potatoes for one person.
Even if you were growing bush varieties that can grow close together, this is still a 20-foot row of sweet potatoes for every person in your family! But realistically, you are probably not going to need that much.
Firstly, sweet potatoes might be ideal for storing – but they are unlikely to stay edible for a year. Even under optimum conditions, they will only last for six months. So you can halve your number of plants to 10 per person.
And, as the seasons roll by, you will have various gluts of other vegetables to eat. You will probably only feature sweet potatoes on the menu when other crops are scarce. You may also grow similar vegetables instead of sweet potatoes, such as winter squash, carrots, and regular potatoes.
So, bearing all this in mind, even five sweet potato plants per person should still give you a plentiful supply for several months – but not so many that your nearest and dearest get sick of them!
Read More – Sweet Potato Companion Plants – Good And Bad Companions!
Conclusion
Thanks so much for reading our guide about how many sweet potatoes per plant you might expect.
Remember that our typical yield is around one pound of sweet potatoes for every slip. One pound per plant might not sound like much – but it can add up fast, especially if you grow other yummy garden crops.
What about you?
- Are you going to grow sweet potatoes soon?
- Which sweet potato cultivar are you going to grow?
- Have you ever grown sweet potatoes before?
- If so – how many sweet potatoes per plant do you usually get?
- Finally – how many sweet potatoes do you eat per year?
We’re sweet potato fanatics. And we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Thanks again for reading.
Have a great day!
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