Time for a quick quiz: what’s long, purple and grows underground? Perhaps you’re thinking carrot, or maybe a mutant burrowing eggplant. But what about a sweet potato? I’ve grown a lot of different veggies over the years, but never one like this. And thanks to our friend and fellow MG Carla, the purple sweet potato is going to be on the 2013 garden plan here at Happy Acres.
Carla picked up her sweet potatoes at a market in North Carolina several years ago. She brought them home and cooked them, and liked them so much she decided to try growing them herself. Since then, she has been unable to find anything exactly like them in stores or in gardening catalogs. She has no idea what variety they might be, so we have now christened them Carla’s Purple!
Carla’s purple sweet potatoes
To be sure, purple sweet potatoes aren’t exactly new. The Okinawa types, which have white or tan skin and purple flesh, were developed by Japanese growers and have been popular there for several centuries. They also made their way to Hawaii, where several million pounds are grown annually for local use and for export to the mainland. And Daphne at Daphne’s Dandelions grew one called Korean Purple last year, but I believe it had purple skin and white flesh.
The purple sweet potatoes that Carla grows look nothing like the Okinawan types or Korean Purple, and have a purple skin and flesh. It is still likely an Asian variety of some sort. Over the years Japanese breeders have come up with quite a few purple fleshed varieties that are available to gardeners and commercial growers. The purple color is the result of anthocyanins, which is a group of pigments that give red, blue and purple colors to many of our fruits, vegetables and flowers. They also have powerful antioxidant properties, so these beauties should be good for us as well as tasty to eat.
I’ll wait until early April to start sprouting the sweet potatoes to make slips. You can start slips by suspending the sweet potato in water until it roots, or by rooting in soil with some bottom heat applied. At this point I’m not sure which method I will use. I might even try it both ways for comparison. I don’t usually plant sweet potatoes here until the first of June, after the soil is thoroughly warmed up.
I am looking forward to trying these purple beauties here this year, and with any luck we’ll be seeing purple here this fall!
UPDATE: Carla sent me a photo of the sweet potatoes that show how purple they are inside. I’ll post it below. Thanks Carla for the photo and for the sweet potatoes!
purple sweet potatoes and carrots
I just wish I could grow ANY sweet potatoes – let alone beautiful purple ones! Our summers are just too overcast and cool for them to grow well. I do love to eat them though and wish (often) we lived and grew our garden in a warmer clime.
They do love heat, which does make them dependable here given our hot summer weather.
We need a picture of those purple interiors! I’ve eaten and grown blue potatoes, but never purple sweet potatoes. How interesting. The same blue pigment combined with the red-orange of sweet potatoes should give purple.
Carla sent me a photo and I added it to the post. They are really purple! And I’m sure they are loaded with antioxidants.
Really nice! I wish we could grow sweet potatoes too. But we’re right on the cusp of zones 4 and 5 and just a bit too cool.
That too bad Sharon. To be sure, sweet potatoes love the heat, and they love our hot summers.
A friend of mine from New Zealand waxes lyrical about the Sweet Potato varieties there and I’m fairly sure she’s mentioned something similar. I will get on to her and see. If so a lot of the varieties there were introduced by South Sea islander communities – how they came across them I don’t know.
That’s an interesting twist for sure! I never thought about other Pacific islands as maybe being a source. I can see how they would be popular though. My wife and I ate some mashed purple sweet potatoes at a Luau when we were in Hawaii.
Your purple sweet potatoes look exactly like my purple sweet potatoes: long and slender, deep purple inside and out. A friend of mine gave them to me and she got them from a member of her Japanese community. I don’t know the name of them, but I sure do like them. I just call them Purple. In my garden, they needed a longer time in the ground than the Violetta, Red Wine Velvet, or Old Kentucky, the other varieties I grow, but they did well.
Thanks for your input Christina! I am really looking forward to growing these.