 Good morning and welcome to the channel. So this is going to be an update video on my experiment growing sweet potatoes in a cold climate. We are at almost mid-July now and this little plant has been growing. So I started this sweet potato plant way back in January and I just wanted to give you kind of an update. So when I start talking cold climate, that doesn't mean that where I live that it is cold year-round. We actually are having some very nice hot summer days. Temperatures have been over 30 degrees a few times in June, which is you know above normal warm temperatures for us. We've had very little rain, so it's a very dry hot summer so far. So as far as cold climate gardening, what that really means is that we have a short outdoor growing season. So our last frost date is usually mid to end of May. I usually gauge it by end of May usually and our first frost day can come about mid-September. So that gives us only about a hundred and ten days of outdoor growing time and sweet potatoes take about a hundred and eighty days from start to finish. So they are a bit of a challenge to grow here on the Saskatchewan prairies in growing Zone 3. So for a lot of our plants that we grow in our outdoor garden here in Zone 3, we have to start them indoors, such as our tomatoes. As you can see, they are really taking off. They're loving this summer heat. Peppers are another thing that we have to start indoors to get a good jump on the summer season. As you can see, I have some sweet banana peppers coming here. I got some Italian frying peppers and over here are my rainbow peppers. And coming along now are some King of the North green peppers. So these all do very well in our climate. Like I say, if you get a good jump indoors on these and get them planted out. So June, July, August are usually our hottest time of the year. The other downside of gardening in a cold climate is our winter season. We have really cold temperatures here in Zone 3 where the temperatures can, you know, drop below minus 30 degrees Celsius. For long periods of time, which limits the amount of perennial flowers and vegetables and herbs that we can grow here that normally would survive winters in warmer climates. So the sweet potato has a growing time of about 180 days, which is about six months. And I started this plant in January. So what I did is I purchased some sweet potatoes from the grocery store. I believe they were a purple, purple sweet potato variety. I can't remember now. And I started off by growing some potato slips off of them. So by doing that, you just set the potatoes in some soil. I think I used some sphagnum moss, put them under my grow lights, kept them moist under a dome. Downstairs in my growing space. So in about mid-February, I had a good amount of slips growing off of those two sweet potatoes. And from there, then I just cut them off the the potato and put them in water and started rooting them. Then I believe it was mid to end of March. I had a bunch of slips with a lot of nice roots on them. And that's when I planted them up into this container here. So I knew I was going to have to keep them indoors for a couple more months. So I chose something small. So I'm not really sure how big a harvest I'm going to get. But I'm just hopeful that there is going to be some tubers underneath the dirt here hopefully in another month or so. So once I planted them up in this container, I gave them a little bit of fertilizers, some worm castings. And then I put it in my grow tent and it really flourished in there. It had a beautiful warm, you know, humid environment. It grew really well. So then in early May, when the day started warming up outdoors, I started hardening it off by setting it out on my patio for a few hours each day. And then by the end of May, when risk of frost was all gone, this became another container plant out on my deck. And it's actually a very pretty plant. Just, you know, the vines are nice and it makes a nice decorative plant. I do have a lot of the ornamental potato vines growing in my container as well. So if I don't end up actually getting any amount of harvest off of this, at least it's been enjoyed on my deck as a nice decorative plant. So we're at almost six months right now, close to that 180 day mark. So I'm not going to look for any sweet potato tubers or do any digging around yet. I want to wait until about the end of July. So for today, I'm just going to top it up with some little bit of soil because it's looking a little like it could need a little bit of healing around it. I'm not sure if this will help with developing some more sweet potatoes under the soil, but I just think it might be worth just topping it up. This is some potting soil that I've added a little bit of all-purpose fertilizer to. I'm just going to top it around here. So I do have four four plants in this pot here. Then I'm going to give it a good drink, some rainwater that I've mixed up with some comfrey tea. Some very smelly stuff here. Just give it a good drink. Then I think I'll just put it back out on my deck with my other potted flowers and we will just leave it for, I think, you know, until the end of July. So I'll probably do another follow-up video at the end of July. We'll have a look under the soil here and see if we've got any sweet potatoes. So this was just a quick follow-up to my experiment with growing the sweet potatoes in a cold climate. I have the first three videos in short versions. I will link them in the description box below, so you can kind of see how I started and to get to where I am today now. Like I said, this is going out into a sunny location. Sweet potatoes love lots of heat. The weather is looking hot and sunny for the next few weeks, so hopefully something will be growing under the soil here. So if you have any experience with growing sweet potatoes in containers in cooler climates where, you know, it's a bit of a challenge, I'd love to hear about it in the comments. Don't forget to hit the like button and subscribe so you don't miss out on the follow-up video of my sweet potatoes.