I just harvested my first successful sweet potato crop. You will recall that last summer I planted a sweet potato crop—and I never followed up with how it went. Well, it didn’t get far. Between my poorly amended garden soil, dry weather and bunnies, the “slips” or baby sweet potato plants never took hold (most of the blame rests with the bunnies).

But 2026 was different. Thanks to my new raised bed, fresh and fluffy, organically rich soil and a fence that absolutely locked out rabbits, my sweet potatoes not only had a chance of surviving but thrived in the warm weather and ample rain.

In this post, I compare growing sweet potatoes from purchased slips with growing them from old sweet potatoes that have sprouted.

Can You Grow Sweet Potatoes from Last Year’s Harvest?

There’s more than one way to get a sweet potato crop started. I tried purchased slips, while my sister discovered that an old, sprouting sweet potato could work, too.

Growing Sweet Potatoes from Slips

I ordered sweet potato “slips” from Sow True Seed. A slip is a small, sprouted shoot that grows from a mature sweet potato tuber. Instead of using true seeds or whole potatoes, these shoots are snapped or cut off the potato and planted to grow a new sweet potato crop.

My order from Sow True Seed included six slips of a variety called White Bonita and 12 slips of a variety called Bayou Belle.

White Bonita, as its name suggests, is a variety with white skin (beige, really) and creamy flesh. Two of my six slips didn’t fare well and died but the other four did survive.

Bayou Belle has burgundy-pink skin with a deep orange flesh. Again, a few of the slips didn’t make it but I had about eight or nine slips that did survive.

Just to clarify why some slips didn’t make it—it was partly the fault of the weather. We had a cool June, and sweet potatoes don’t like to be planted in cool weather. As I was waiting for the soil temperature to warm up to at least 65ºF—the ideal temperatures for planting sweet potato slips—the wait was just too much for some of the slips and they couldn’t hang on.

Growing Sweet Potatoes from Old Potatoes

While I purchased mine from a seed company, it turns out you can plant them from old tubers. “The Internet” will tell you that that’s not the right way to plant them. However, my sister has proof otherwise.

She had forgotten a small tuber from last year’s harvest and found it shriveled in a closed box in her cool basement in early spring. It had started to sprout, so her husband planted it in early spring, taking care to have the shoot sticking out of the soil. She said it took about six to eight weeks for growth to get going, but that makes sense considering it was not yet warm weather.

She tells me they harvested about two dozen tubers from that one shriveled old potato. Amazing! I just may “forget” a few small sweet potatoes in a dark and cool space this winter and try this technique myself.