AdAgrA Conference 2025: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

John Dysinger

Berry Good Strawberries

Kenny Point

Cultivating Sweet Potatoes for Storage or Market

Alan Seiler

Ricky Seiler

Bed Prep and Planting for Thriving Plants Part 1

Bed Prep and Planting for Thriving Plants Part 2

Caleb Dysinger

Growing Lettuce in Summer Heat – Tips & Tricks

Melissa Clayton

Chett Clayton

Grow Great Garlic!

Seth Shaffer

Small Scale No-Till Methods

Cover Cropping and Its Benefits

Stepping into Hoophouse Growing – Should You Do it? Part 2

Stepping into Hoophouse Growing, Should You Do it? Part 1

Daniel Nicholls

Scaling Up Your Composting

I've been growing sweet potatoes for a while now.

It's a crop that I enjoy, really love growing, and I feel like all of us should be growing sweet potatoes, and that's 1 of the things we're going to talk about during the course of this presentation.

The outline, we're going to look at reasons to include sweet potatoes.

How many of you are currently growing sweet potatoes?

Before we go any further, let's have a word of prayer.

Our Heavenly Father, thank you for the many blessings that you provide for us.

Thank you for this opportunity to come to this conference to learn of you and the things that you've created, the things that you have provided for us to take care of us.

Please help us to use the time that you're giving us to prepare for everything that's coming down the road.

So we ask you to guide us and direct us and help us to fill the role that you design and designated us to be in this world.

We ask this in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, amen.

Okay, so going back to just the outline, we're also gonna cover just the cultural requirements, the things that you're gonna need in order to grow sweet potatoes.

We're gonna touch on pest control, controlling any pests that you might be faced with.

We're gonna look at harvesting, the curing and storage process for sweet potatoes.

That's something that I think is important, but it's also something that a lot of people don't cure their potatoes.

And I think when you do that, you could get better results by curing.

So we're gonna discuss that a little bit.

And then some sweet potatoes secrets and surprises that I've learned and that I wanna share with you.

And I'll save some time at the end for questions and answers.

So starting out with the reasons to grow sweet potatoes.

For me, it starts with, you know, the culinary uses and the fact that sweet potatoes are, they're good in terms of the flavor, the versatility.

There's so many ways that you can use sweet potatoes, so many things that you can do with them in the kitchen.

There's Low maintenance in terms of growing the crop.

So I think that's something, another reason why we should be growing them.

Self-sufficiency, this is something that I'm big on in food independence and food security, especially in the times that we're in, People are recognizing that there are issues with our food supply, things that they're doing to the food, things that they're putting in food.

So the more that we can grow and produce on our own, the better off we're going to be.

Like If you're farming or if you're even in a backyard garden, if you're growing sweet potatoes, there's something that there's a lot of demand.

People are interested in sweet potatoes and people like them.

So if you can take them to market, that's something that you're going to be able to profit from.

Then another thing that I really like about sweet potatoes is that you can store them, and they're easy to store.

It's not like if you're harvesting produce from a garden and you have to can it, go through that process with sweet potatoes.

Yeah, there's a curing we're going to talk about, but that's just a simple thing.

And then after that, you can store sweet potatoes.

I've stored them easily for a year beyond a year.

I think you can get, you know, possibly close to a couple years of storage.

And so that's something, another benefit, another thing, the reason why it's important to grow sweet potatoes.

Last year, well, this current year, we went in West Virginia, we had a severe drought.

So my sweet potatoes weren't as productive, but they still, they were productive, they survived.

And the prior year, previous to last summer, I had 1 sweet potato plant that yielded 25 pounds of potatoes.

So think about that, that's from 1 plant.

And if you could, yeah, that wasn't the average, that was the highest yield for a plant.

So even if the average was 15 pounds over the entire garden, that's still a really good production.

I mentioned that we had a drought this past summer.

And in spite of that, I really didn't irrigate my sweet potatoes.

So I was reserving that water for the high tunnels.

So in spite of that, the sweet potatoes, they still survived just on the little rain that we did have.

And throughout the drought period, they lived.

Production would have been higher if there had been rain or irrigation.

But in spite of the drought, and that's the type of conditions too that we may be faced with in the future.

So we need to be prepared, our plants need to be prepared, the varieties that we're growing.

We want things that are hardy, both in terms of drought, in terms of cold, whatever condition we may face, we want to be able to work towards being able to handle those right now.

So, and then the next point was that just that everyone that can grow sweet potatoes, you should be growing them.

So, I want to encourage you, or even if you had failures with them in the past, try again.

You want to continue, you want to develop your skills at this point while we can, while you have that time and opportunity.

So now I have a picture, which you can't see, but it's just from where I lived in Pennsylvania.

I was doing more going along the scale of backyard gardening, but I was still growing and producing sweet potatoes.

In this photo, it just shows the diversity because there were different colors of the sweet potatoes.

And you could just look by looking at the photo, you could tell that there was a lot of diversity in the varieties that I was growing.

If you're just starting, you want to plant some sweet potatoes, what's the first thing you're going to need?

You're going to need sweet potato seed, yes.

In terms of sweet potatoes, the seeds are going to refer to as slips.

We're going to discuss how you can, and you should be growing your own slips.

But even before that, you have to decide, okay, what varieties am I going to grow?

And there are lots of different varieties.

Typically when we go shopping, we go to the grocer, we're faced with a single variety.

If it's a sweet potato, it's just going to be a sweet potato.

Maybe you'll see some things labeled as yams, but you're not going to be able to get that diversity to get, oh, here's a yellow sweet potato over in this aisle.

Around here, you have your orange or your white.

You're just going to be stuck with whatever they're growing.

But if you can go and select your variety and that way, even the purple sweet potatoes, a lot of people have never even heard of or seen or tasted a purple sweet potato.

Getting back to the seed, the slips, that's something that is so easy to grow your slips.

And for me, when you talk about food security and independence, This is 1 of the crops that everything, every aspect of it is in your hands.

You're not dependent on someone to grow your and provide seeds for you.

And here's like a, I have a sweet potato just in this little container.

And there's many options that you can use to grow your slips.

You could just put that potato in water and have it just growing in water.

Or in some cases, you don't need to do anything.

Series

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

Cultivating Sweet Potatoes for Storage or Market

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Market Gardening Track

A Balancing Act

59m

Misc

Bootstrapping a School Farm

48m

Journeys in Agriculture

Journeys in Agriculture Testimony Part 3

1h 10m

Intensive: Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping

Introduction to Backyard Beekeeping Part 3

58m

Orchard Frost Protection

45m

Another Eye, Another Apple

35m

Homesteading Track

Cultivating Country Cash: Crafting a Thriving Rural Livelihood

59m

Philippines Mission Report

11m

Plum Pudding and Things We Believe

46m

The Entrepreneur's Toolbox

Entrepreneurial Core Competencies

53m

The Heavens Declare His Glory

14m

Community Health

False Prophets of Health Ministry

21m

Sound Doctrine