Sweet Potato

a trailing vine related to the morning glory, moon flower, and cypress vine. It is not related to the potato nor to the yam, though often called a yam in the south, especially by the colored people. It is well to remember also that in the South potato means sweet potato--the others are called Irish or round potatoes. The sweet potato was found in cultivation by the Southern Indian, and is doubtless native to America. The vine seldom blossoms. It produces no seed. Field crops are planted by placing a layer of tubers in a hotbed and covering them with a few inches of sandy soil. Inside of a few weeks the bed will be full of sprouts which may be broken from the tubers and set in rows. If replaced in the hotbed, the tubers will bear a second crop of sprouts. A bushel of tubers will produce 3,000 to 5,000 sprouts. A little later, additional plants may be started by setting twelve-inch cuttings of the running vine. The latter are not so sure to live, but they produce quite as fine tubers.

Under improved facilities for transportation, there is a tendency to raise each vegetable where it grows best and ship it to market in less favored localities. A belt of fine sweet potato country runs around midway between the mountains and the sea through Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and North and South Carolina. This belt extends northward through Virginia into New Jersey. Texas and California are also large raisers of sweet potatoes. The Ohio Valley would feel slighted if left out of the list, but Georgia is the leading sweet potato state. Not less than 50,000,000 bushels of sweet potatoes are raised in the United States annually. Immense quantities are shipped to market in barrels, and twice as many would be in demand if some inexpensive method of preventing winter decay could be devised. Sweet potatoes are raised by over a million farms in the United States. Half a million acres yield about 43,000,000 bushels a year with a farm value of $20,000,000.