Ornamental Sweet Potato Vine Care

Ornamental sweet potato vine ipomoea batatas makes an excellent addition to any garden they do well in traditional flowerbeds in landscaping and are wonderful container plants.

Ornamental sweet potato vine care. Ornamental sweet potato vines don t produce many flowers which means they often don t produce seeds. Ornamental sweet potato winter care ipomoea butatas or sweet potato vine thrives in hot tropical climates and is an ornamental foliage plant often used as a foil for flowering displays. This heat loving perennial will die back if the plant experiences hard freezes below 32 degrees fahrenheit 0 c. Popular varieties like marguerite have small round tubers while varieties like blackie have longer narrower tubers.

That means the tubers it forms are actually edible. The sweet potato plant or sweet potato vine has been cultivated for around 2 000 years for its sweet tasting tubers. The ornamental sweet potato plant ipomoea butatas is somewhat different from its southern grown vegetable sibling. While you may be able to coax your plant into producing sweet potato vine seeds they aren t guaranteed to be good so it s best to propagate in other ways.

Although the plant works well as a ground cover it is especially effective. Many ornamentals are also sterile and only really viable to produce from cuttings. Ornamental sweet potato vines may start small but some varieties will have you swimming in lush leaves by mid summer. The foliage lends a tropical feel to the garden and comes in a range of colors and varying forms.

Ornamental sweet potato vine ipomoea batatas is valued for its colorful foliage and rapid easy care growth habits. Here we compare three different varie. Sweet potato vine ipomoea batatas named for its edible cousin is an ornamental warm season annual grown for its attractive leaves and vining habit. While it does produce edible sweet potato tubers albeit not very palatable and bitter the ornamental variety bears more colorful foliage making it a popular houseplant.

It is said that columbus brought the plant to europe from the new world on his expedition missouri botanical garden though the variety of sweet potato plant that produces the edible tubers can be planted for its trailing vines more recently different variations have been.