Vegetable · Convolvulaceae
When to plant sweet potatoes
Grown from slips, not seed, and needs consistently warm soil for months.
Plant out
3 weeks after
Counted from your last spring frost.
Days to maturity
90-120
From planting out to a first picking.
Frost tolerance
Tender
How much cold the plant itself will take.
Those weeks become real dates once you name a place.
Timing, in frost-relative terms
Seed packets rarely give calendar dates, because a date that suits one latitude is wrong at another. They give offsets from the last spring frost instead, and those offsets are what make sweet potatoes plantable anywhere.
- Plant out 3 weeks after the last frost.
- Expect 90–120 days to maturity, counted from planting out.
Getting the timing right
Plant slips three weeks after last frost into soil at 18C or above. In cool climates, black plastic mulch is the difference between a crop and a disappointment.
Frost tolerance
Damaged at 1C - even a near-frost harms the roots. Lift before the first frost, not after it.
Classified as tender, with damage expected below 1°C (33.8°F)33.8°F (1°C).