Suffering from Stupid City Person Disease. Plz send help.

[gethenian]

Last spring, I put some pretty purple ivy stuff in my window boxes. Ornamental sweet potato vines, the tags said. Being a stupid city person, I assumed that this meant they were just pretty ivy vines that resembled sweet potato vines, whatever those looked like.

Comments

[digitalusrex]

i have no answers for you, but i want to say "that's awesome!"

[owlsie]

apparently they are edible and taste just like regular sweet potatoes, but you have to puree them. [don't take my word for it. i would try it tho, out of curiosity]

[roaming]

I'd double check on the edible part, just to be safe. Sometimes plants that are not "bred" specifically for food, but are considered "ornamental", aren't that safe. It's not worth the risk, imo.

[wiebke]

Wow, you grew potatoes in a window box! That much be some window box! My mom and I tried over and over to grow potatoes in an actual veggie garden to almost no success. Either we would get micro-potatoes or nothing or, one time, a -giant- potato. We gave up.

Of course, this garden of ours was in horrible soil in a pine forest, no less. Only thing that really grew well there were berries (thrive on acid).

[violet_serene]

Really? I've always found potatoes to be one of the easiest things to grow, even in a container (although, yeah, you might need different soil). The trick is to put the seed potato *on top* of the soil, don't bury it at all, but cover it with some mulch like dried leaves. The seed potato will put roots down into the soil, so the new potatoes will form maybe 6-ish inches below the surface. Taters do fine in containers so long as they some room to spread out--the bigger/wider the container the more taters you'll get.