Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Sweet potatoes in a temperate climate, such as the UK in this case, where the summers are not hot.
It’s early July, with glorious sunshine, but the temperature isn’t going above 24 °C / 75 °F, and for us, that’s a warm day here in Somerset. Sweet potatoes actually like it quite a bit warmer than that — around 30 °C / 85 °F — so I’ve got fleece over them to help keep the warmth in.
Can sweet potato succeed at 51° north, the same latitude as Nova Scotia? That means summer heat is rare. Daytime temperatures this summer were actually higher than normal, and afternoons were 23 °C / 73 °F on average.
The sweet potato variety is Beauregard, and often when I grow sweet potatoes here, there is no harvest or only a very small one. Here I used different methods, growing them no dig in a mix of homemade compost and a bit of mushroom and green waste. The boards are to hold it in place while the sweet potatoes are growing, and the fleece helps to increase warmth.
They’ve taken a while to get going, but there’s a lot of leaders coming out, and I hope by September the roots will be accumulating in the compost, because that’s the month when they mature.
We’ll see what happens by the end of September.
The harvest was 2.9 kg / 6.4 lb, a modest but encouraging result for this latitude and climate.
🎥 Filmed 10th October 2025. by Carly Dutton-Edwards
🎵 Music: Rory Dunwoodie, @rorydinwoodiemusic IG: rorydinwoodiemusic
You can join this channel by paying a monthly fee, to support our work with helping gardeners grow better, and to receive monthly videos made only for members:
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00:00 Intro - July
00:54 Using fleece to increase warmth
01:20 Extra compost added
02:03 Keeping the compost dry
02:22 Watering through the cover
02:52 October - stems for eating, Beauregard variety
03:21 Harvesting the sweet potatoes
07:03 No dig soil - beds and paths
09:21 Treading down soil after disturbance through digging
#sweetpotato #nodig #charlesdowding #ukgardening #homegrownfood #vegetablegrowing #growyourown
Sweet potatoes in a temperate climate, such as the UK in this case, where the summers are not hot.
It’s early July, with glorious sunshine, but the temperature isn’t going above 24 °C / 75 °F, and for us, that’s a warm day here in Somerset. Sweet potatoes actually like it quite a bit warmer than that — around 30 °C / 85 °F — so I’ve got fleece over them to help keep the warmth in.
Can sweet potato succeed at 51° north, the same latitude as Nova Scotia? That means summer heat is rare. Daytime temperatures this summer were actually higher than normal, and afternoons were 23 °C / 73 °F on average.
The sweet potato variety is Beauregard, and often when I grow sweet potatoes here, there is no harvest or only a very small one. Here I used different methods, growing them no dig in a mix of homemade compost and a bit of mushroom and green waste. The boards are to hold it in place while the sweet potatoes are growing, and the fleece helps to increase warmth.
They’ve taken a while to get going, but there’s a lot of leaders coming out, and I hope by September the roots will be accumulating in the compost, because that’s the month when they mature.
We’ll see what happens by the end of September.
The harvest was 2.9 kg / 6.4 lb, a modest but encouraging result for this latitude and climate.
🎥 Filmed 10th October 2025. by Carly Dutton-Edwards
🎵 Music: Rory Dunwoodie, @rorydinwoodiemusic IG: rorydinwoodiemusic
You can join this channel by paying a monthly fee, to support our work with helping gardeners grow better, and to receive monthly videos made only for members:
youtube.com/channel/UCB1J6siDdmhwah7q0O2WJBg/join
00:00 Intro - July
00:54 Using fleece to increase warmth
01:20 Extra compost added
02:03 Keeping the compost dry
02:22 Watering through the cover
02:52 October - stems for eating, Beauregard variety
03:21 Harvesting the sweet potatoes
07:03 No dig soil - beds and paths
09:21 Treading down soil after disturbance through digging
#sweetpotato #nodig #charlesdowding #ukgardening #homegrownfood #vegetablegrowing #growyourown
