Ornamental Sweet Potato Vine Indoors
Ornamental sweet potato vines are versatile plants that are equally suitable for filling outdoor containers spilling over a wall or covering ground in a landscape bed.
Ornamental sweet potato vine indoors. Sweet caroline sweet potato vines are ornamental sweet potato ipomoea batata hybrids with colorful bronze green purple or red foliage. Bulb like tubers grow just beneath the surface of the soil. Sweet potato vine winter care. The three most important things you ll need to worry about for sweet potato vine care indoors are light watering and pest control.
Even better the leaves are edible and tasty. Overwintering sweet potato tubers. Sweet potato vine ipomoea batatas named for its edible cousin is an ornamental warm season annual grown for its attractive leaves and vining habit the foliage lends a tropical feel to the garden and comes in a range of colors and varying forms. 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.
Caring for sweet potato vine plants indoors is a bit more difficult than growing them outdoors especially during the winter. The decorative sweet potato vine ipomoea batatas is a vigorous fast growing vine that does well as a houseplant and as an annual or perennial garden ground cover. Plant a sweet potato in water and almost before your eyes it transforms into a sprawling vine with lime green or purple tinged leaves. 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.
Warning do not leave the same water in your jar for more than two weeks as it will become foul smelling and will attract fruit flies and other pests. Otherwise there are several easy ways of overwintering a sweet potato vine. Follow these steps to planting and growing your own sweet potato vine indoors. Once these plants have begun to grow robustly indoors they will be ready to transfer to large mixed containers with other plants.
One of the easiest ways to create multi seasonal interest in the garden is to use plants with interesting foliage. This heat loving perennial will die back if the plant experiences hard freezes below 32 degrees fahrenheit 0 c. They also are popular as indoor plants and can be grown inside year round or just during the cold of winter. They tend to grow to between 2 and 4 feet tall with a.
Ornamental sweet potato vines don t produce many flowers which means they often don t produce seeds. If you want to grow your sweet potato vines as decorative plants find a small three or four inch seedling pot with good drainage. Plant the slips in containers. Use an organic sweet potato.
Many ornamentals are also sterile and only really viable to produce from cuttings.