Selecting Your Sweet Potato Vines

Here are some useful tips on selecting the best sweet potato vines for planting:

• It is important to select your sweet potato vines from the crops that look clean, healthy and vigorous. These should be crops that are relatively youngish at 2-3 months old after planting. When you select your vines from healthy and vigorous crops, you will be guaranteed better yields and even more vigorous sweet potato crops. When you harvest the sweet potato vines from crops which look unhealthy or virus infested, you can certainly expect the same from your crop.

• When you cut the sweet potato vines from the crops that are older-in the range of 5-6months-just before the harvesting of the sweet potato crop, you will likewise produce very poor sweet potato yields and a less vigorous crop. In the older sweet potato crops, the food that is stoned in the vines and which is needed for the growth of the crop in the early months has been channeled to the roots and tubers of the plant in order to enlarge the roots. To order the best sweet potato vines, email Kenya Sweet Potato at freerangefarming.info@gmail.com or call 0725 772524. We will sell you best sweet potato vines at the cost of Ksh.1500 per bag plus cost of transportation. We deliver vines all over Kenya and the minimum number of vines that you can buy is 1 bag. 

• The tip of the stem vine with the shoots on top makes the best planting material although where there is shortage of vines, you can also harvest the stem branches when the tips have been harvested. When cutting the vines, cut the top 30cm of the vine and ensure that this vine contains several nodes that will grow faster once the vine has been inserted into the soil. The reason why the top tip is harvested is because it grows very fast and recovers very fast from the planting shock. It will give you the best results compared to the lower parts of the vines which grow with some difficulty, particularly in the drier conditions. 

• Another reason why the tip of the sweet potato vines is chosen is because it generally has less a likelihood of infestation by the weevils or the stem borer eggs due to its exposure to the sunshine than the lower branches which are concealed from the sunshine. You should only use the middle parts of the sweet potato stems or vines when there is a shortage of vines. This occurs in cases where you are harvesting the sweet potatoes from a tiny farm and you need many of them. But it is best practice to avoid the lower or basal parts of the stems as much as possible as they are generally infested with eggs, larvae as well as the adult weevils.

• When cutting off the vines, ensure that you make a clean and slanted cut on the vines you are harvesting. So it is always important to use a sharp knife when you are harvesting the vines. Hire a large labor force in case you need to harvest a large amount of sweet potato vines within a very short time.

• This is why it is important to purchase vines from verified sources. Ensure that all your sweet potato vines are purchased from trusted sources in order to ensure that you have quality guarantees. They should be healthy visually and also free from many of the pests and diseases which afflict these vines. The person cutting the vines should examine the shoots in order to ensure that it is free of larvae, eggs, pests or even dark spots on the foliage of the vines. Curled or shriveled leaves are also a sign of poor health on your vines.

• Even in cases where there is an infestation of the vines, you can de-infest them by dipping the sweet potato vines in some water and ash mixture which will eliminate the larvae and other forms of pest infestation. This should be done before the vines are planted. The desired length of the vine should be 20cm to 30cm. 

• Ensure that the field is adequately prepared 2-3 days before the planting of the vine. This will ensure that you don’t hurt your nails and fingers when inserting the vines into the mounds. In the rural areas, this process is done with bare hands and this can really bloody your nails as the tough soil will peel off the skin surrounding the nails. It would be advisable to buy gardening gloves that you can put on when planting the vines in your shamba. It is important to buy these for your workers too. If they hurt their fingers and nails the first day, they fingers will be too painful the following day that will not be able to deeply burrow through the soil and plant the vines deep inside the soil. This will in turn result in these “floating” on the mound and they can either be washed off by heavy rains or will result in exposed sweet potato tubers which are rapidly destroyed by months long exposure to sunshine. Planting the vines early in your garden will also prevent their rapid deterioration.  Here is an example of sweet potatoes being planted with gloves: