How to Plant Sweet Potato Slips: A Detailed Guide to Planting Methods and Key Techniques

Sweet potato is an easy-to-grow crop and a high-yielding, highly adaptable food crop. To grow sweet potatoes well, we need to understand how to plant sweet potato slips?

How to Plant Sweet Potato Slips

First, simply turn over and loosen the soil. When planting sweet potato slips, it is best to set them deep so they can stand upright, avoiding the problem of leaning after being blown by wind, and this also helps them take root in the soil. After planting, make sure to water every day in the early stage. After one month, fertilizer can be applied; a compound fertilizer is sufficient. Once they have grown a bit, proper pruning is needed, which helps with fruiting. Finally, do a good job of pest and disease control.

1. First, select good seed potatoes. For high sweet potato yields, first choose relatively large sweet potatoes that are intact and unblemished, and check whether they have many sprouting points.

2. When sowing, soak the sweet potato seed potatoes in a Duolingjun solution for about ten minutes, which can both prevent disease and stop mice from stealing and eating them. When sowing, pay attention to the head and tail; if you cannot tell them apart, place them diagonally.

3. When the sweet potato slips grow to 30 to 40 cm, we should cut them off, then cut them into small sections with three leaves per section, and they are ready for cuttings. When taking cuttings, generally keep a spacing of about 30 cm between each plant.

4. After transplanting, the first fertilization is needed. This fertilization is mainly to help the cut sweet potato slips grow new roots, so it is generally human manure and urine water that is applied. The second fertilization is after the sweet potatoes have survived; because their growth varies, they look uneven, so to even out the seedlings, urea can be used. The third fertilization is a seedling-promoting fertilizer, applying urea together with a little compound fertilizer. The last and most important is the fruit-swelling fertilizer, which generally uses potassium fertilizer and boron fertilizer.

5. In order not to consume too many nutrients and to make later harvesting convenient, we need to train the sweet potato slips in the field, combing the sweet potato vines in one direction and letting them grow in one direction. During this process, excess branches and leaves can be removed.

6. What generally harms sweet potato growth are leaf rollers, aphids, white grubs and field mice. Leaf rollers and aphids damage sweet potato leaves and affect photosynthesis, while white grubs and field mice eat the sweet potatoes in the field. For pests that harm branches and leaves, use trichlorfon solution for spraying and killing; for field mice, mainly use trapping.

The planting of sweet potato slips is briefly introduced here. If you need to know the details, you can consult the relevant people.