How to Grow a Potato Vine Indoors

Is it a Sweet Potato or a Yam?

Have you ever grown a tater vine indoors?

My mom loves candied yams, I hate them. As much as I like sweets I just never could get into eating a marshmallow covered potato, yam, whatever. She even likes just washing and baking and adding some butter and eating that way. The only way I have ever liked a yam or "sweet potato" is in a pie or fried. I was convinced to try sweet potato fries in a restaurant once and found them to be rather tasty. I admit I did sprinkle on some extra salt.

Well it never fails, every year someone gives me a bag of yams. I'm not even sure if this one is from the sweet potato family or the yam family. I was told there is a difference. One is tubular and one isn't. I did some research and found that yes indeed there is a difference. A sweet potato is short and round with tapered ends and a yam is long and cylindrical. The sweet potato has a smooth thin skin and the yam a rougher almost scaly skin resembling tree bark. A sweet potato can have a thin pale yellow skin and yellowish flesh and not be sweet at all or a thicker orange skin and vivid sweet flesh. The yam is a tuber of a tropical vine and not even related to the sweet potato. The one I will be writing about for this article I believe is a sweet potato as it was short and round.....

I remembered how when I was a young girl my mother and I grew a russet potato vine that hung from the top of the fridge to the floor. I decided to try this with one of the sweet potatoes (the rest went to the neighbor to be eaten).

I cut the sweet potato in half and choosing the half with the most "eyes" on it I placed three toothpicks evenly spaced around about halfway down the sides of the halved potato. I then placed the potato cut side down into a jar of water. The toothpicks were to suspend the potato and keep it from falling into the jar. The potato should be suspended into the water so the toothpicks should not be too close to the cut. The jar was then placed on my kitchen windowsill which faces the south side of the house.