Getting sweet potatoes to produce healthy vines above ground seems to be *very* easy. Getting the potatoes themselves to grow large requires a little more effort (e.g. very loose soil). But even if you get both of these right, you might still end up having a helluva time trying to get all of them out of the ground. It's no problem if you don't mind having more vines grow next year (that can be a huge benefit). But I planted our sweet potato garden in the middle of a circular driveway, which we want to redo. So I'm trying to eradicate the potatoes and do something else with the space. This is proving way harder than I imagined.

I planted a few dozen slips a few years ago. After the first year, I harvested everything I could to the best of my ability. Afai knew, that was the end. Then the next year, more vines came up. I had left some little taters and slips in the ground, evidently. What I learned: they're very difficult to get rid of, so you're better off planting them in plastic bags, buckets, or something else that makes it easy to know exactly where there is a potato.

Apropos of nothing, this one was very funny looking. It was like a diknbalz that had its own wiener.

The problem with planting haphazardly is that you end up with an entanglement of vines like this

They run for several meters at a time with shoots going into the ground every so often. But these shoots break easily. So you end up pulling in the vine, breaking a bunch of the shoots, and leaving taters in the ground. Most of them are fingerlings but occasionally you get a huge one. And in any event, if you don't get all of them, they'll come back next year.

In this photo, you can see the tip of one that was growing under our driveway. I found our irrigation pipe while I was trying to get it.

This one came up easily. One tater, many shoots.

Here is a long stretch of vine without leaves. The vine was slightly covered, and pulling it up without visible clusters of leaves to use as a map almost certainly left a few taters in the dirt on account of fibers breaking as I pulled.

Here's a close up of some of the weak fibers connecting the tater to the vine. Failure to get out whatever that is coming from means more vines next year. This is great if you want a potato garden that keeps on giving. But without a mechanical harvester, I'm switching to a bag planting system with the slips I plant this year.

Always watch for snakes in the garden. This appears to be a harmless black racer that is molting (explains the coloring and the cloudy eyes).

We only got to a third of the small planting area. Focus this season will be to plant in a way that will make a hand harvest faster by minimizing the guess work as to where the sweet potatoes are buried.