Make a sweet choice for your garden

If you have a lot of room in your vegetable garden, be sure to plant some sweet potatoes this spring.

Sweet potatoes are productive and easy to grow, have few pests, tolerate drought and a good harvest can last for months if properly stored.

Plus, sweet potatoes have a lot to offer nutritionally: the orange ones are loaded with vitamin A (a serving has four times the recommended daily allowance), vitamin C (half the RDA) and beta carotene.

They are also a good a source of fiber and complex carbohydrates. At about 100 calories per medium size, they contain no fat or cholesterol.

And the leaves are also nutritious, with a good amount of protein and and can be cooked like greens.

The tender tips are particularly tasty.

Unlike white potatoes, which are started by cutting the potato into pieces, sweet potatoes are roots and don't have "eyes," so are started from "slips," young shoots that grow from the stem end of the root.

You can buy slips in bundles from garden or farm supply stores, or through the mail. Alachua Feed and Seed hopes to have sweet potato slips in the middle of this month.

Plant these "cuttings" with about two-thirds of their length under ground and water daily to make sure they don't dry out.

The vines grow quickly and will soon shade out any other weeds.

Sweet potatoes do need a whole lot of room to ramble, so plant them where they can stretch out. Each vine can reach up to 20 feet long.

They produce the best roots in a light, sandy, slightly acidic soil. They will grow in heavier soil, but the roots may be knobby.

Work the soil to a depth of at least 8 inches, incorporating well-rotted compost or other organic matter in advance of planting.

Don't overfertilize, or you'll get more leaves and fewer, smaller roots. If you are using commercial fertilizer, choose one with a low first number (which represents nitrogen).

Roots begin to form at the nodes lying along the ground 30 to 45 days after planting, and can be harvested at nearly any size until the tops die down.

Dig carefully to avoid bruising the thin skin and cure by air-drying in the shade or warm room for about two weeks.

The flavor gets sweeter as they cure, since some of the starch will convert to sugar. They won't cure at temperatures lower than 70 degrees.

Do not refrigerate; in fact, they should not ever be stored lower than 50 degrees, as they will develop off flavors and even rot.

There are several varieties that are suitable, but you may not have a choice if buying from a retailer and not mail-order.

Georgia Jet is a 90-day producer that can be grown as far north as the Dakotas. We have a long hot season here, so a quick grower isn't necessary.

Look for Porto Rico (no, that's not a typo), which grow more compactly and are good for small spaces; Vardaman - a bush variety; Beuregarde; Georgia Red; Jewel; Centennial - America's leading sweet potato; Coastal Sweet; Boniato (which is also the name of a tropical sweet potato popular with Hispanics); and Sumor - a Clemson University introduction that has smooth tan skin and dry flesh, that can substitute for a white potato.

Almost half of this country's sweet potato production is in North Carolina. China has recently emerged as a huge grower, using it mostly for livestock fodder.

Sweet potatoes are not yams, even though people - and even some grocers - use the terms interchangeably. Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batatus) are in the morning glory family.

Yams are the tubers of a tropical climbing plant in the Dioscorea genus (of which our invasive air potato is also a member). They have a dry, starchy flesh and are grown in the Caribbean. The term yam came from the African word nyami, referring to the starchy, edible root of the Dioscorea genus of plants.