Most home gardeners buy transplants or "slips" from a local plant grower. If you grow your own transplants, the sweet potatoes should be bedded in a greenhouse or hotbed (76^o to 80^o F preferred) about five to six weeks before the planting date. Use only disease-free sweet potatoes. Ordinarily, 1/2 bushel will cover 8 to 10 square feet of bed surface and produce about 1,000 transplants. The roots are covered with 3 to 4 inches of sand and then watered down. To produce just a few plants, several sweet potatoes can be placed in a deep pan, covered with moist sand, and placed in a sunny area. As rooted slips are produced, cut these from the sweet potatoes. Cut off the bottom rooted portion of each slip and place the shoots without roots in a bottle of water to reroot. This will eliminate scurf disease, which is often present on sweet potatoes.

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