Purple sweet potato cultivation is the right choice for farming because it is quite easy to maintain and does not depend on the season in planting. In addition, the business opportunity of purple sweet potato cultivation is still a great opportunity because of the increasing demand for foodstuffs from tubers, especially purple tubers to be produced into various processed foodstuffs.
The cost of cultivating sweet potatoes is much less and produces much higher profits compared to other fruits and crops such as sugar cane, rice and soybeans. Sweet potato plants are very resistant to dry conditions (xerophytes plant species) in the dry season and can stay alive without watering in a long time.
For Opener, Let's Recognize Sweet Potatoes More Again
Sweet potato plant is a popular vine cultivated by Indonesian people to use the sweet potato as a complementary dish and taken the young leaves to be used as vegetables. Sweet potatoes are also widely used as ingredients to make snacks such as cakes, typical souvenir chips, bakpau and bakpia, anekan drinks and even ice cream. In some areas, sweet potatoes are one of the main food commodities.
Sweet potato is one of the foods with abundant carbohydrate source that the body needs. Sweet potato we can make alternative food substitute rice white rice. Actually the nutritional content of sweet potatoes is better when compared with white rice.
Sweet potato plants commonly named after sweet potatoes have a scientific language Ipomoea Batatas L. It is a food derived from South America that lives in tropical temperatures. There are many types of sweet potato cultivated in Indonesia, seeing from the popular color is grown are sweet brownish, red, and purple sweet potato.
Some popular types of sweet potato include prambanan, borobudur, mendut, kalasan, ibaraki, cilembu, lampeneng and georgia.
In Indonesia, sweet potato cultivation achieves the most optimal productivity when planted in lowland to a height of 500 meters from sea level (mdpl). However, this sweet potato plant can still grow well at altitudes above 1000 mdpl, only the timeframe for harvesting from planting time becomes longer.
Sunlight is required by this plant for maximum results, its solar radiation needs about 11-12 hours a day. Sweet potato cultivation is suitable to be done in tropical area with humid and hot temperature. The ideal temperature for the plant for sweet potatoes is 21-27 degrees Celsius with rainfall of 750-1500 mm per year.
Prepare Good Crop Land
Preparation of this land should be done within a period of at least 3 weeks before planting seeds. Good soil conditions for sweet potato cultivation is sandy loam soil, loose and many contain nutrients and have good drainage. The ideal soil for sweet potato cultivation requires a soil acidity of about 5.5-7.5 pH.
Sweet potato cultivation on dry soil and cracks will decrease plant immunity, consequently the plants are susceptible to pests and diseases. Conversely, if planted in a muddy or wet site tuber will be dwarf, high fiber content, tuber easily rot and the shape of bumps.
Sweet potato plants grow well on moor land or former rice fields. On moor land, sweet potato cultivation is suitable to be done at the end of the rainy season. As for the rice field is more suitable in the dry season. To prepare a good land, the need for fertilizer to improve the quality of the soil relatively requires a lot of fertilizer, let alone the former land of rice fields.
Planting Sweet Potatoes Good and True
Sweet potato growers are quite easy to do, but there are trivial things you should look at for this planting for sweet potatoes to grow optimally with adequate nutrition. Seeds of sweet potatoes should be planted by immersing 2/3 stem cuttings into the soil.
On 1 row of cropping land there are two rows of plant lane, seedlings planted on both sides rather marginal from each bed. Distance of plants between one line 40 cm, this is so that inter-plant has a portion of nutrients from the maximum nutrient soil.
Technique of planting the seedlings done in a subtle way, first of the ground beds dug a little with a light planting tool, put the seeds on the ground that has been perforated. Then seed the seedlings also in a subtle way. After all the seeds are planted, the next step is watering.
At the beginning of planting the soil always moist and wet, watering done every morning and evening on every seedlings that have been planted in the bed. If the rain intensity in the plant area is high enough, you do not need to do watering. If the rain water level is too much, you must reduce it so that the moisture level of the soil is maintained.
This initial planting cultivation is done routinely about 2-3 weeks and ensures the plant grows new stem buds, let the buds propagate wildly to the ground to optimize the initial growth of the seeds you plant.
Harvesting Sweet Potato
Sweet potato season ready to be harvested is when the cassava plant is 3.5-4.5 months old, depending on the varieties of sweet potatoes grown. Good harvesters are done during the dry season, harvesting when the soil is loose and too wet will make the tubers wet and prone to decay.
If the harvest time coincides with the rainy season, the solution is to choose a day at least 7 days after the rain falls. If it is difficult to meet the appropriate day, after harvesting the harvested tubers should be dried from the remaining water, dried or sweetened to dry the tubers.
Make sure after harvesting the bulbs clean and dry. Successful sweet potato cultivation is a plant that can produce at least 1 kg of each plant seed. Calculations for one hectare of land can yield 25 to 30 tons. In certain varieties such as sweet potatoes of Borobudur varieties and kalasan can reach 30-40 per hectare harvest.
