Sweet! The Surprising Story of Sweet Potatoes

Which vegetable suggests that Asians may have actually traveled all the way to South America long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue? Which vegetable is preferred in the south of the United States? But the health experts say all of us everywhere should be eating more. And which vegetable is grown from something that you've only heard of in the lingerie section at the store? That's what we're diving into on the Grow youw Self podcast. Are you intrigued yet? Which vegetable do you think this is? Well, you're going to learn all about this incredible vegetable that lots of us like to eat around the holidays. So it's the perfect time to learn more about this incredible good for you vegetable that you can learn to grow yourself. Today's episode is brought to you by the Gardenary Consultants. After starting my own business with Rooted Garden in Houston, Texas, which by the way, if you're in Houston, you should absolutely give us a call. I've helped train gardeners all over the country to start their own garden consulting businesses and they are ready to help you get your garden planned for 2021. So right now, believe it or not, is the best time to be making those decisions and getting ready for an incredible, healthy, garden centered year. So check out the Gardenary garden consultants@gardenary.com businesses and find a Gardenary consultant close to who can help you start to grow yourself in 2021. All right, let's dive in to today's episode because this, my friends, is sweet. I'll see you inside. Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're craving. I'm Nicole Johnsey Burke, your host and the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious yet? I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden. The kitchen garden may just be the answer that you've been looking for on your own journey to health and wholeness in this podcast. It's going to inspire and enable you to make garden magic right in your very own space. If you're someone who wants to eat more good food that's actually good for you, fill your day with great stories you want to text to a friend. If you want to hear more about inspiring people and do a little bit each day better than the way you did it the day before, grow yourself is what your ears have been waiting for. You won't just learn about gardening here, you'll learn how to make growing as a person a big part of your everyday life. And your life, your community and your garden of course, will be all the better for it. So. So put in your headphones, turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Welcome to grow yourself. Alright, so what do you call roots that say things like, you're so, so nice. I love you so much. You know what? You are the best. You know what you call those roots? They're called sweet potatoes. If you are looking for someone who has really bad vegetable garden puns, I am here for you, okay? Okay. I know they're so bad, but I just can't help it with these dumb puns. Because you know what? I am who I am. We're actually not talking about yams today, we're talking about sweet potatoes. And believe it or not, sweet potatoes are different from yams. What? Yes. I'm gonna tell you all about it today. You're gonna love it. We're gonna dive into the fantastic sweet subject of sweet potatoes. You're gonna leave this episode feeling inspired to grow sweet potatoes, to buy sweet potatoes and to cook with sweet potatoes. I promise. Let's talk about first of all, why you should eat more sweet potatoes. Number one, they are so highly nutritious. They're a great source of fiber, vitamins and minerals. Just 1 cup 200 grams of baked sweet potatoes provides you with tons of VI nutrients and I am going to tell you what those are. Are you ready? So you are going to get just from that one serving of sweet potato, you're going to get like 4 grams of protein, 769% of your daily value. Recommendation for vitamin A, 65% of recommended vitamin C, 29% of vitamin B6, 27% of potassium. You're going to get all kinds of good, good st for you. Just when you eat a little serving, 200 grams of sweet potatoes. Second reason to eat more sweet potatoes is it promotes gut health. So you're going to get lots of fiber in sweet potatoes and you get antioxidants. And those are both proven to help you with your digestion, your gut health. So sweet potatoes actually include two kinds of fiber soluble and insoluble. Your body can't digest either types of those. You know what that means? It's stays in your body longer, helps you feel full longer and then helps you do the number two. Number three, sweet potatoes can have cancer fighting properties. So we all know we want to keep the big C away from us, away from our family and even Those who have cancer. This is a great way to increase your body's power to fight it. Sweet potatoes have lots of antioxidants which studies have shown can help reduce risk or spread of cancer. They have anthocyanins, which is a group of antioxidants that are especially found. And guess what? Purple sweet potatoes. So next time you're buying from the farmer's market, you definitely want to be asking for the purple ones. When they've done mice fed diets that are rich in purple sweet potatoes, there were lower rates of early stage colon cancer. That suggests that the anthocyanins have a protective effect. They've also shown that extracts of orange, sweet potatoes, potatoes and sweet potato peels have been found to have anti cancer properties. So eat the peel, eat the inside and eat purple sweet potatoes. Next reason to eat more sweet potatoes is so you can see all those beautiful sweet potatoes that you're growing. Sweet potatoes are rich in beta carotene. That's why they're orange. And that antioxidant is responsible for also helping you see, see better. So in one cup, just 200 grams of baked sweet potato with your skin, you're going to get seven times of beta carotene that you need per day. So seven times more. So you could just do that once a week and you're like set for life, right? If your body can take it all in, beta carotene is converted to vitamin A in your body and that turns into light detecting sensors. You're going to become like a seeing superhero. When you eat more sweet potatoes, you're also going to have better brain function. So again, the purple, purple sweet potatoes prove to help brain functions. In animal studies, they've shown that the anthocyanins in purple sweet potatoes protect your brain by reducing inflammation and preventing free radical damage. Finally, you're going to have a stronger immune system, which we all need right now. So when you eat more orange flesh sweet potatoes, you're going to have a natural source of beta carotene, which we already talked about helps your eyes, but it also that vitamin A in your body helps increase your body's immunity. So those are six reasons why you should absolutely be filling up on the good stuff of sweet potatoes. Now let's talk about the history of this food. Where did it come from? How do we get it? I mentioned at the beginning that the sweet potato has provided hints that there may have been travel from Asia over to South America before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And all those European explorers who claim to have Discovered it. So first of all, sweet potatoes definitely started in Central and South America. This is a food that, you know, a lot of times we talk about food starting in the Mediterranean, North Africa. This one started over here in the Americas. Central and South America, to be specific. These sweet potatoes have been used for over 5,000 years to support the nutrition and growth of the south and Central American populations. So awesome, right? 5,000 years old. That's crazy. But listen to this. Studies have showed that there are traces of sweet potatoes in the Cook Islands in the areas of Polynesia all the way back to 1000 A.D. in fact, sweet potatoes were grown over there, they think, before the age of discovery. So before the European, you know, discoverers started traveling everywhere, they are showing that sweet potatoes were already being grown in Asia. So there's this whole NPR article that I read where the. What are those called? Paleontologists or archaeologists? Anyway, those people have been doing studies to try to figure out, could people have traveled all the way from Polynesia over to South America, gotten the sweet potato root and brought it back? Is that crazy? So they really do think they're starting to believe more and more. An archaeologist at University of Berkeley, California, really thinks that Polynesians were well equipped to sail right across the Pacific to South America and pick up a potato. What? He says they had, like, sophisticated double hulled canoes, very large catamarans. He also thinks perhaps they brought chickens with them. Crazy, right? So they brought chickens, dropped them off in South America, and picked up some sweet potatoes on the way. The study says, well, maybe if that didn't happen, maybe the roots, like, got caught in some seaweed, something like that, and kind of got carried over to Asia. But they think it really was a personal exchange because in Polynesia, one of their words for sweet potato is kumala, which resembles kumara or kumal, which were the Quechua words for sweet potato. So crazy to think that that exchange might have happened back in 1000 A.D. right? So, so crazy. All right, so Columbus did encounter sweet potatoes when he was in the West Indies and when he was in the Yucatan and Honduras in Central and South America. But he decided to. He recorded it in his journals after his trip to Honduras. And he is credited, be it's true or not, with the introduction to the New World in Spain in about 1500. And then once it hit Spain, then there was an introduction to Europe during the 15 and 1600s. But if you think about it, sweet potatoes began in Central and South America, where the climate is super different than it is in Europe. It's actually pretty slow to see spread in Europe because of that fact, because you really need warmer temperatures to grow sweet potatoes. So this sets it apart quite differently from a lot of the other foods we've studied, where the spread went through Europe, because those plants like milder, cooler temperatures. Sweet potatoes are not like that. But sweet potatoes did take off with European settlers in North America, and it's first marked in Virginia from 1648. And the sweet potato again went north and south from, like, the Monticello settlements and the early European settlers. There was a southern migration of the plant and a northern migration of the plant. But again, as you can guess from the European situation, the plant did much better in the south than it did in the North. But Native Americans were known to have grown sweet potatoes by the 1700s. Maybe they got it from the European settlers, or maybe they got it or had it before, who knows? But they were definitely growing it as well in their own cultures. Now, even today, sweet potatoes are definitely much more popular in the southern part of the US Than they are in the Northern. I know this for a fact because I've lived in both places. And in my home state of Mississippi, every time I'm home with my mom and dad in August, they always have a big old box of sweet potatoes that they've just bought from local farmers that they keep all through the fall and winter. It's awesome. They're grown. The sweet potatoes are grown literally right down the street from them, and they're so, so delicious. But I've never, ever, ever seen a big box of sweet potatoes here where I'm living now in Illinois. So that brings us to our next point of the podcast, which is where sweet potatoes are currently grown in the United States. So the sweet potato is very common in Asian cultures, perhaps from that first Exchange back in 1000 AD but they really haven't caught on a ton in the Western diet. But most nutritionists and health experts say, hello. Why are we eating more sweet potatoes? So good for you. Not that expensive, easy to store. We should all have sweet potatoes as part of our regular diet. So sweet potatoes are grown mostly in North Carolina in the U.S. in fact, North Carolina is the number one sweet potato producing state in the entire country. Crazy. North Carolina produced on average 5,260,277 CWT a year from 1990 to 2000. A CWT is a unit of measurement in agriculture, which basically means 100 weight. Louisiana is also known as a place where most sweet potatoes are grown in the US The Sweet potato is a warm weather vegetable, so of course it loves growing in Louisiana. And would you believe this because of the low chance of frost in most parts of southern Louisiana, sweet potatoes are grown year round in Louisiana. Isn't that cool? I love it. All right, guess what? Guess who else grows sweet potatoes. I know you're never going to guess this state because they don't grow any of our food or anything. Just kidding. California, of course, they grow some sweet potatoes too. It is an ideal state for growing almost everything, but they do. They're the third highest producer of sweet potatoes. So I am proud of Louisiana. I went to high school in Louisiana. So I have to say shout out to la, not LA in California. Louisiana in the South. For being for beating California in this one. I'm just glad we showed up finally we beat California and won thing. So California, they grow all the greens, raisins, figs, olives, whatever, but they also grow a lot of sweet potatoes. Coming in fourth. Just behind California is my home state, Mississippi. MI Crooked letter, crooked letter I. Crooked letter, crooked letter I. Humpback. Humpback. I. Did any of you guys have such a fun time spelling your state when you're growing up? I don't think so, but we did because we are so great. Usually people don't associate Mississippi the way they should because it's an amazing state. Home to some of the biggest and brightest celebrities and heroes of our country, including me. Just kidding. Anyway, they love growing sweet potatoes. Like I said, my mom always has a big box. And we are fourth in sweet potato production, which is pretty impressive given our state is pretty small in terms of population. Most people don't associate Mississippi with sweet potatoes. But you definitely, definitely should. Excuse me. Because our warm climate makes it possible. We grow things like cotton, soybeans, rice and other warm loving plants. Finally, number five is my favoritest place to grow my business, Rooted Garden based in Houston, Texas. Texas is number five in sweet potato production and is the second largest industry in the whole state. What? That's crazy. Texas also grows obviously cattle and wool and cotton and lots of corn, wheat and hay. Texas is a huge agriculture state, but they also grow tons of sweet potatoes. So we love growing sweet potatoes for our clients. With Rooted Garden. I loved growing sweet potatoes when I lived there. So pretty fun. If you live in those states, you should absolutely be buying all the sweet potatoes from your farmers. Like my parents buy those big boxes. You should totally do that. Do not ever eat a sweet potato. If you live in those states, you really should not be eating Sweet potatoes that are shipped, right, because you're going to have much better tasting, more nutritious sweet potatoes available to you right outside your door. And if you live in those places, please, please, please try to grow some yourself. Because there's a super cool, fun fact about sweet potatoes, and that is you can eat the whole thing. So sweet potato leaves are edible as well, and they're so good for you. So when you grow your own, you're going to get exposure and get to eat the entire plant rather than just the roots. Plus, when you grow your own, you're going to get that just amazing garden to table experience which cannot be beat. So North Carolina, Louisiana, California, Mississippi and Texas, you guys, all of you living there, listening from there, grow your own sweet potatoes. Buy sweet potatoes from your farmers and local CSAs. Do not buy imported or, you know, don't buy shipped sweet potatoes. And definitely be asking your grocery store, hey, why don't we have locally grown sweet potatoes? We're the second largest producer of sweet potatoes in the country. Or third or fourth or whichever one you are. All right, sweet potatoes. When I was doing photos for my book Kitchen Garden Revival, which hopefully you have, I did a photo. I was doing plant family photos. And when it came time to take plant family photos for sweet potatoes, they're the only ones in the photo. They're a little awkward. They're like, oh, nobody else is in our family. So they're actually in the convolvulace family, which is also, like, more commonly known as the morning glory family. And there's tons of species in that plant family. You've probably grown morning glory flowers, but most are just herbaceous vines. Very few of them are actually edible or things we would grow to eat, but sweet potatoes are one of them. And so it was just kind of weird. We ended up not putting that photo in the book because it just looked awkward. But that doesn't mean that you can't grow this plant family. Just if you learn alongside me, you know, I like to teach with plant families. So this kind of lets you know that sweet potatoes are pretty much in a family of their own. They're in a league of their own. They're not going to be grown like most other plants in the kitchen garden. So here's some fun facts about sweet potatoes. Number one, they aren't yams. They aren't. They are. They yam. What they yam. They aren't yams. So yams are in a different plant family. They are perennial herbaceous vines, and they're mostly Cultivated in tropical regions for starchy tubers. So yams are. Can be perennial, meaning they can go on and on and on, like live for years. And they're grown, they have, like, a rougher outside, and they're just different. They're a different kind of plant altogether. So don't let some. Now at the grocery store, they may not, you know, tell you the difference, but actually, yams and sweet potatoes are two different plants. Two different plant families, two different. They look different. So yams are going to look a little bit more like barky. We'll try to put two photos for you on the blog. And yams are like barky kind of rougher. And sweetness are just so, so sweet and soft. Fact number two, do you guys remember the name George Washington Carver? I remember learning about this incredible hero of food, of American food in school. Most people know him. He's an African American agricultural scientist from Missouri, Missouri native. And he did tons of work with peanuts. So you may know him more associated with peanuts, but actually he also did tons of work with sweet potatoes. In fact, he's credited with developing over 125 diverse products with sweet potatoes, including dyes, wood fillers, candies, paste, breakfast food, starches, flowers, and molasses. So check out the work that George Washington Carver did with sweet potatoes. Super fun. Number three is that sweet potatoes actually make great kitchen decor. So don't put those sweet potatoes down in the bottom of your pantry or, you know, in your fridge. They can actually just sit out. And we're in November right now. They're a great Thanksgiving centerpiece. Like, use them decoratively. You can put them out in a nice little bowl. You can have a wood bowl, something like with autumn colors. And use sweet potatoes kind of like you would use little gourds or squash. Just try it out. Okay. Especially if you have a good mix of, like, purple ones and brown ones and orange ones. See what you think. I think sweet potatoes are super sweet as fall decor. All right, next fun fact is that sweet potato smoothies may be the new favorite thing. So if you are a smoothie fan, which I definitely am, you may often find yourself using something like bananas or avocados a little too often in. In your smoothie mix. And if you're trying to eat local and more seasonal when you're making smoothies, you have to realize that bananas are. If you live in the US and you're not, like, in a tropical region, bananas are not really local and not really seasonal. So it's hard to make a smoothie with Some sweetness in it and some creaminess and still be local. But sweet potatoes can make that possible. So you just cook the sweet potatoes and let them cool, and you can even freeze them if you want to give like a little bit or kind of maybe not all the way freeze, because that's gonna be like a rock. But you could do little cubes, freeze them up, and then blend them up in your smoothie. It's gonna give you a sweetness to your smoothie. And you can call that more seasonal and local than if you're using bananas. Sound good? I think so. Now let's start talking about how to grow sweet potatoes. As I mentioned, they're in a league of their own. So sweet potatoes, you're not gonna start, you're not gonna order a seed, a little seed package, and you're not gonna grow it like a potato, like in the Solanaceae family. You're actually gonna grow it from a slip. This is what I hinted to in the intro when I said it's grown from something you typically only associate with lingerie. So a slip is actually a little shoot, like a little green growth. And this grows off of a mature sweet potato. I'm sure you've seen YouTubes or Pinterest or like eye catching photos of sweet potatoes in a jar of water and then these gorgeous greens coming off of them. So those are slips, little sprouts. And one sweet potato could actually produce up to 50 slip sprouts. You can create this literally from your Thanksgiving sweet potatoes. Just try it as a little experiment with your kids, with your friends, whoever, stick some in a jar of water and grow some greens off of it. Even if it's not time to plant sweet potatoes, which it's pretty much not, not anywhere in North America right now, you can eat the grains and you can just kind of watch and see the magic of your food. It's pretty awesome. So sweet potatoes are grown from slips, and once you've created those, you only want to plant sweet potatoes after all chance of frost has passed. So even in Houston, where we really have very little frost, we actually don't plant our sweet potato slips until late April, early May to end of May. And that's in a really warm climate. So any place where you might have a chance of frost, do not plant those slips before. They're definitely not frost hardy. And they love hot weather, warm weather. I would say they like hot weather more than warm weather. So when you plant your slips, you want to give them at least 9 to 18 inches. And typically you want to space out the rows pretty well. So I have grown them in raised beds quite a bit for myself and for clients. And we generally might grow in say a four by six space. We might grow 12 plants, something like that. So a four by six is 24 square feet. So we're growing basically one plant every two square feet. That's a little tight if you're growing in rows. But we can work it out in a kitchen garden because the roots have more space to spread down and grow up and out rather than growing really wide. So you do want to give them space because they're going to need space to run. So you'll see pretty quickly that the leaves, oh my gosh, they just take over. It is some wildness in the middle of the summer. But one of the great things is all that wildness is great for your soil health. We like to grow these for clients if they're traveling during the summer or just don't want to work out in the heat and humidity. Sweet potatoes are fantastic. Just soil coverage because of all the green that grows from just a few slips. Sweet potatoes are also drought free. Drought, drought tolerant, that's it. Not drought free. And so that's another great reason to grow them in hot places. It's going to protect your soil and not demand a ton of water. But you will definitely get more production if your plants are getting at least one inch of water a week. In general, we haven't had a ton of pest issues with growing sweet potatoes. You will get the occasional pest. You know, you might get aphids or flies or things on your leaves, dealing with your leaves and then you also. I've experienced where we got grubs in the soil attacking our tubers, our roots a little bit. So those are two things you may have challenge with. There are diseases that can affect them like black rot and stem rot, things like that. So you want to make sure you've got nice healthy soil. You could solarize your soil, especially because it's going to be before it gets hot. You could solarize your soil before you plant them. This is definitely a plant where soil super duper matters because all the growth is happening underground. So you're not going to necessarily see what's going on down there. You know, even we've had times where there's tons of green growth, but not a lot of tuber root growth. So this is a time where soil health is super important. You want to make sure your soil is as disease free as possible and just really take care of your soil through the growing period. And what is the growing period? Super long these plants are going to take, I would say. I've read the directions, and they say 90 days, but honestly, I would say 120 and up. Our experience has been 90 days. You're just not going to have very big roots and not a lot of production. So this is one of those things. Like, we might plant this in May in Houston, and we will be harvesting sweet potatoes late September, even into October and November. The neat thing about it is, if your soil is healthy, you can leave some sweet potatoes down in the ground and just kind of harvest them as you go. We've had clients who will harvest some and, like, even wait until right up before Thanksgiving, harvest a few more just as a special celebration for Thanksgiving, which is super great. One hill of a sweet potato plant could yield about 2 pounds of sweet potatoes if you've got really good production. So you can kind of plan out, all right, how much is two pounds? Maybe even go to the grocery or the farmer's market, weigh out two pounds of sweet potatoes, and you can know, okay, each slip is going to produce about that much. A lot of times, I think we overestimate the production from one particular plant. We forget how much space is actually needed to grow our food. When you harvest them, you do want to give yourself some time. You're not going to harvest and immediately eat them that night. They need to do something called cure. One other thing to consider is before you harvest, like, a couple days before you're gonna harvest, go ahead and cut the vines. This will put the plant's energy 100% into toughening up the roots. So kind of hardening the skin off and making it less likely that you're gonna skin them as you pull them up, and also probably will sweeten them up a little bit, too. Then once you harvest them, you want to give them a chance to cure in a warm place. So this could be, if you like, the warmest spot in your home near a heater or something like that, and let them cure few days before you eat them. So this is gonna kind of let the plant settle in with its sugar content, make it sweeter, and the flesh will be brighter and more colorful. So pretty awesome, right? You can store sweet potatoes for a long time. Get this, six to 10 months. So if you haven't listened to the episode about eat this all winter long, one of the things I talk about is eating sweet potatoes. They store so well. So if you're looking to get the most out of a plant and have Something that stores and can carry you through. This is how South American, South. This is how Native Americans kept their civilizations alive, guys, for like 5,000 years. They would grow these sweet potatoes, store them and eat them nearly year round. These kind of foods should really be at the base of a lot of our diets because they don't require a ton of shipping, a ton of storage, turn of like refrigeration, and they last so long. So we should really be basing a lot of our diets around strong foods like this. It's good for our bodies, as I already told you, but it's also so good for the environment to focus our diets more around foods like this. You do want to store them in like 55 to 65 degrees, but they don't have to be stored in the refrigerator. So kind of spread them out, make sure they're not rubbing against one another and they're not in a really wet area and you'll end up having sweet potatoes for a long, long, long, long time. Now, if you're getting excited about eating sweet potatoes, I have to tell you about this cookbook I found in my research. It was in a great article from Bon Appetit magazine and the book is called Sweet Potatoes Roasted, Loaded, Fried and Made into Pie. It is all about eating sweet potatoes by Mary Frances Heck. So you'll have to check this out if you're wanting to get more creative in the way you're going to consume your sweet potatoes, which I hope you are after this episode. Right. All right, let's our food fight to close up this episode. Sweet potato in one side of the arena versus potato in the other side of the arena. Who do you think is going to win? Sweet potato or potato? Let me pull up my notes here. Alrighty. In the area of vitamin A. So this is for 100 grams of the potato. All right, so in the area of vitamin A. Oh, my goodness. Sweet potatoes, like 14187, 14,187 units compared to 2 units of vitamin A and potatoes. Sugars, we got 4.18 grams in a sweet potato. And how many in a potato? Only 0.82. Interesting, right? Because some people say I think that starch and potatoes bad, but the sugars actually are way higher for sweet potatoes. Vitamin B5, we got 0.8 milligrams in a sweet potato and 0.295 milligrams in a potato. You got one more gram of fiber in a sweet potato than in a potato. For potassium, we got 425 milligrams for the potato and only 337 for the sweet potato. And when it comes to vitamin C, now, this is surprising. When it comes to vitamin C, 19.7 milligrams. Is this right for potatoes? And 2.4 milligrams grams for sweet potatoes? That seems off to me, but okay. When it comes to minerals, actually, potatoes win in most categories. So potatoes have more iron, 32% more iron, 26% more potassium, and 21% more phosphorus. And sweet potatoes have 150% more calcium and 37% more copper. So if you're going for more iron, more potassium, more phosphorus, you're going to go for the potassium potato. When it comes to vitamins, potatoes win again. I am so confused about the vitamin C thing. I'm really gonna have to check this, but that's what it says. So potatoes have 700% more vitamin C, 90% more vitamin B, but sweet potatoes have way, way, way, way, way, way, way more vitamin A, 2,500% more vitamin E, 90 more vitamin B. And. And then potatoes actually have more folate, 36% more folate. All right, so when it comes to vitamins, the sweet potatoes actually went out on most. And then when it comes to minerals, it's a close tie. But the. Yeah, it's pretty much tied. All right, so let's do a comparison. In terms of sugars, you're gonna have less sugars with just a plain potato, less sodium with a plain potato, and then lower in the glycemic index is with a plain potato. And then in mostly between minerals and vitamins, there's kind of a good wash there. So I don't know. What do you guys think? When it comes to calories, they're saying that potatoes are actually lower than sweet potatoes. So I have to say, guys, I'm a little surprised about some of these numbers. I don't know about you. I will say, when it comes to growing, I have had more success actually, with growing potatoes over sweet potatoes. Potatoes, to me, are a little bit more predictable. The vines are not nearly as wild, and they grow just as a small plant. So the vines, I mean, they're not vines, actually. So the bush kind of grows up and vertically. You hold it in. You know, you can put mulch around it or compost around it, and it's a little bit more contained. Like, you could actually grow it in the kitchen garden. But oftentimes we'll grow it right outside. Sweet potatoes, they just take over. It's just wild and crazy. But it is a fantastic thing to grow at a time when most other things are not fun or growing well. So if you live in a temperate climate, if you live especially in the southern part of the U.S. florida, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, it's a wonderful thing to grow during the summer. And I would say it's probably one of the easiest things to grow during that time of year. So I don't know about this food fight, guys. I would say I'm a little surprised. I would say in terms of eating, I much prefer the taste of sweet potatoes. I love how many different ways I can use them. Them. And I found, like, I just, I feel better. I don't know why, but I don't feel as heavy when I eat a sweet potato versus eating a potato. Potato. You know what I'm saying? Potato. So you tell me, what do you think? What would you prefer to eat, potatoes or sweet potatoes? I have to say I'm a little surprised about some of these vitamin and mineral comparisons here. So fun to know. So that concludes our episode today. That is so, so, so, so, so sweet. Are you feeling inspired? I have to tell you, I put this episode in for November because my mom makes the best sweet potato casserole. She makes it every Thanksgiving. One half has marshmallows on top, the other half has this amazing pecan candy thing. I'll try to take a photo to share with you guys on Instagram around Thanksgiving holidays because I will be home in Mississippi with them. And so I was just thinking, I bet most of us, lots of us, like to have sweet potatoes around the holidays. So it's kind of fun to know the story. Now when you're sitting around the holiday table for Thanksgiving with your family and people are talking about stuff that you really don't want to talk about, like politics, then you can bring up these surprising stories about sweet potatoes and totally upend the conversation and make it so much more exciting and fun and uplifting. What do you think? I think we should all be talking more about sweet potatoes and how that could change the world if we all ate more, bought from our farmers and our CSAs and filled up on the goods stuff. That's what I think. So what did the potatoes say to the yam? Any idea? She said, boy, you sure are sweet. And I'm sure she would say that to the sweet potato, too, if she knew that sweet potatoes were different from yams. What can I say? Potato puns just appeal to me, guys. All right, thanks so much for diving into this fun, surprising story about sweet potatoes. Who knew there was so much hidden in that little thing that we like to pop on our plate every now and then. I hope you fill up on the good stuff and eat lots and lots lots of sweet potatoes all winter long. Take care of yourself, fill up on the good stuff and live a garden centered life with us. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. Please share this episode with your friends and family. Get more people growing themselves too, getting ready and prepared to have a fantastic new year together. Thanks again for listening. I'll see ya next week. Foreign. Thank you so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I can't tell you how much it means to know that you are on the other side of this microphone. Sometimes sitting here in this closet, I'm like, is anybody listening? Hello? But I know it's you. So thank you so much for spending time with me. Whether you're running or out in the garden or taking a bike ride or just washing dishes or folding laundry, I'm just so for thankful thankful to have this time with you. So don't forget that this episode is brought to you by the Gardenary Garden Consultants. We really are here to help you not just get a garden, but turn into a gardener. Our goal is to upend the garden industry. Right now, US$150 billion are spent every year in the US on products and services in the garden industry. But most people don't know anything new after they buy that stuff. So our goal is to teach you, to educate you, to encourage you, and to help you become a gardener, not just a person who owns garden stuff. Know what I'm saying? So find your gardenary consultant@gardenary.com businesses and we will help you get your garden planned out for 2021. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next time. By.