Food Forest Ground Cover Layer: Sweet Potatoes and Seminole Pumpkins

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Sweet potatoes make an excellent food forest ground cover layer. Where I live they're perennial and keep the ground covered and cool, suppressing weeds and feeding us. Seminole pumpkins are also part of the ground cover layer in my forest garden, as you'll see in the video. Further north, another edible groundcover might work better, but for any place with mild winters, sweet potatoes work great. Even in a planned out edible landscaping project, sweet potatoes are the bomb.
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[@joshaklese4969]

I am about to do this in the side yard. semanol and sweet potatoes. Looks awesome.

[@mther123]

Excellent

[@cha1biking]

Awesomeness

[@jabohabo3821]

Would love to see thebharvest from those sweet potatoes

[@sparky6020]

Did you actually get any sweet potatoes from here?

[@Chickmamapalletfarm]

I am exploring perennial food forest plants at the moment. I have grown sweet potatoes before , but have always used them as an annual... meaning I dig them all up and disrupt the earth... how does one use them as a perennial, and get a meaningful harvest? I live in zone 7. Won't they die with frost? What are there mulching needs? Do they just sprouts back on there own? I am so confused and excited! They are on my top 5 favorite things to grow and propagate, but I can't wrap my head around using them as a Perennial... please advise.

[@davidthegood]

Zone 7 is on the edge, but they should come back from the ground most years if you have mulch around them. The first year you'll get the best root harvests - subsequent years I usually just harvest greens and a few roots, as the old roots in the ground often get woody.

[@Chickmamapalletfarm]

I see! Thanks for the info. I may give this a try in a few spots. I am going to have an abundance of slips this year, maybe I will take a handful of them and start them around. This could be very interesting. We had almost no winter here this year (western NC mountains) and I think it might just work as a perennial based on my research. Thank for your video and feedback.

[@davidthegood]

Give it a try - they came back for me in Tennessee thanks to some mulch. Good luck!

[@realdealteal111]

Hey, are you in north or south florida?

[@SAHMMNA]

When starting to grow this, how do you keep deer from eating all of it?

[@chrisz.9974]

I’m interested in doing this in my residential back yard lol. Would you say they’re invasive and hard to get rid of? Or nothing a mow couldn’t take care of?

[@davidthegood]

They are easy to get rid of if you pull the roots.