Sweet Caroline Raven^™ Ornamental Sweet Potato Vine Ipomoea batatas

Ipomoeas are great additions to combination planters, but they can sometimes overwhelm less vigorous plants, especially when using a vigorous sweet potato vine plant like this ornamental sweet potato vine. If you are like me, you can let your combination plants duke it out Darwinian style; however, if you prefer to keep a more balanced look to your combination planters, you can cut back or remove stems at any time. Ipomoeas also make great annual groundcovers in the landscape and function well as a trailing foliage plant. They love the heat and humidity; cooler temperatures and low humidity cause them to stay more compact.

While sweet potatoes all come from the same parent material out of Southeast Asia, there is a big difference between the sweet potato you buy in the store and the tubers produced by the Sweet Caroline and Illusion plants. Commercial sweet potatoes have been bred for over 100 years, selecting for those with the best sugar-to-starch content (hence the name SWEET potato). Ornamental varieties have been bred to produce good leaves and no tubers. Though tubers do form, they are composed of almost pure starch and no sugar, making them a poor choice for eating. So yes, you can eat the tubers, but don't expect anyone to come back for seconds!

Also, always be careful when eating any ornamental plant unless you know how it was grown and if pesticides or fungicides were used on it before you got it. A tuber is a storage root, and yes, they store chemicals as well as starch, making this sweet potato vine plant better suited for ornamental use than consumption. An application of fertilizer or compost on garden beds and regular fertilization of plants in pots will help ensure the best possible performance of this sweet potato vine for containers and as a reliable trailing foliage plant.