How to Grow a Sweet Potato as a Potted Plant? The Complete Growing Method at a Glance

The sweet potato is a natural nourishing food with complete and rich nutrition. It helps promote the activity of human brain cells and hormone secretion, and can also enhance the body's disease resistance and improve immune function. Today we introduce the growing method for a sweet potato potted plant.

1. Choosing a pot

When growing a sweet potato bonsai, you can choose to cultivate it in a flower pot, but because the sweet potato is fairly large, you need to choose a larger pot. This way, in the later stages of sweet potato growth, there will be room for the branches and leaves to spread out.

2. Soil

A sweet potato potted plant has low requirements for soil; ordinary soil will do. But you need to loosen the soil regularly to ensure air permeability. Generally, a mix of leaf mold, garden soil and river sand is used as the growing medium.

3. Temperature

In a low-temperature environment, the sweet potato grows very slowly. So when cultivating it, it is recommended to keep the surrounding temperature above 20°C.

4. Water

A sweet potato potted plant can be grown in water or in soil. Under water culture conditions, usually add water up to two-thirds of the sweet potato, and change the water once every 2 days. When growing it in soil, you only need to keep the soil moist.

5. Repotting

When the branches and leaves first emerge, in order to make the sweet potato potted plant look more lush later on, you can choose to switch to a flower pot with an opening of 30cm or more, and the taller the better.

6. Disease control

If yellow leaves appear, you can choose to cut off the diseased branches and let them grow again, and add a few drops of nutrient solution to avoid a similar situation recurring.

The tubers are suitable for processing into many products; they can be used to make soy sauce, candied fruit, maltose and calcium gluconate, and can also be used to brew baijiu and extract alcohol. The tuber residue left after starch extraction can then be used to produce calcium citrate.