Sweet Potato Vines for Flower Pots

Edible Sweet Potatoes

• Large flower pots sustain Ipomoea batatas, edible sweet potatoes. Spacing in traditional ground row plantings requires 12 inches between plants. In container culture, a 12-inch-diameter pot accommodates one sweet potato plant. Larger pots hold more sweet potatoes if plants are 12 inches apart. Long vines trail down sides of tall flower pots, adding ornamental interest to sweet potato container gardens. For optimal growth and development, sweet potatoes prefer full sun. Pots provide excellent drainage for sweet potatoes and make harvesting an easy task. Before frost damages plants in autumn, simply pull vines free, remove topsoil from pots until you find sweet potatoes and gently remove them from their containers.

Blackie

• Ornamental sweet potatoes are true sweet potatoes with dissimilar foliage than edible varieties. Their roots swell into tubers resembling their edible cousins. Although they are also edible, they are not very palatable and lack the familiar taste. Blackie is an ornamental sweet potato with purplish-black leaves on vining stems. As a spiller container plant, its dark leaves provide a sharp color contrast to chartreuse leaves of limelight four o'clocks (Mirabilis jalapa Limelight) or hot-pink flowers of annual vinca (Catharanthus roseus).

Margarita

• Margarita sweet potato has lime-green leaves on vining stems. With Blackie, Margarita won the 2001 Georgia Gold Medal Plant Award in the Annual category. Plant winners undergo rigorous trials and meet strict requirements for outstanding performances. Forming a chartreuse skirt around flower pots, Margarita contrasts with pink, red or purple plants, including petunias, pennisetum, sun coleus and geraniums. Margarita maintains a vigorous growth habit in hanging flower pots where it can trail up to 15 feet.

Tricolor

• Tricolor sweet potato has variegated leaves of green, cream and pink. The echo effect of plant design combines plants that mirror each other's colors. The pink in Tricolor's leaves echoes pink in petunia or vinca flowers. Its cream color echoes the cream variegation in chlorophytum. Like Blackie and Margarita, Tricolor has a trailing habit and grows easily as a houseplant. These are annual vines that are not winter hardy but grow indoors during the winter before setting out the following spring.