Purple Passion Sweet Potato
Ipomoea Batatas

days to maturity: 110 days
plant spacing: 2 plant per square foot 
sunlight requirements: 6-14 hours
look out for: whitefly hiding on the underside of the leaves, plus the plant spreads like a vine
harvest notes: harvest tubers and cure them indoors to produce more sugars
seasons: spring, summer
annual

Purple Passion is a rare purple fleshed and purple skinned sweet potato variety. Purple sweet potatoes are super cool to cook and bake with... purple pie, purple mash, purple everything! Last year was our first growing this variety and the test patch we planted in our exhibition garden did very well and produced lots of beautiful tubers. Make sure you take advantage of the easy propagation of sweet potatoes and make yourself lots of copies of this hard to find variety to plant throughout your garden and share with friends.

Sweet potatoes are great summer crops for your raised bed or your food forest since they love love love the heat, humidity and rain. It’s native to the New World, although the site of origin and the manner in which it originated are still unknown. Plants were distributed as far as New Guinea and New Zealand before the time of Columbus, the sweet potato was an important crop related to colonization and now it’s range has extended around the world, to both temperate and tropical zones. 

Sweet potato is a vining plant that will sprawl throughout your garden creating a beautiful dense ground cover, which is one reason why we love growing it in the summer instead of the fall, since it can be quite competitive in a small space where you are trying to grow other annuals. If you don’t have plans for your veggie bed in the summer consider planting a few sweet potatoes and using them as a cover crop, to protect your soil from erosion and weeds. Once you buy one sweet potato plant from us you can use it to make yourself a whole farms worth of new plants if you want to, as the growing tips of the vines can be cut to 6 inch lengths, popped into a jar of water and in 6 days you'll have a fully rooted new plant.