In its current usage in American English, the styling of the name as two words is still preferred. Some organizations and researchers advocate for the styling of the name as one word-"sweetpotato"-instead of two, to emphasize the plant's genetic uniqueness from both common potatoes and yams and to avoid confusion of it being classified as a type of common potato. The Spanish combined this with the Quechua word for potato, papa, to create the word patata for the common potato. Later explorers found many cultivars under an assortment of local names, but the name which stayed was the indigenous Taino name of batata. The first Europeans to taste sweet potatoes were members of Christopher Columbus's expedition in 1492. Īlthough the sweet potato is not closely related botanically to the common potato, they have a shared etymology. A different crop plant, the oca ( Oxalis tuberosa, a species of wood sorrel), is called a "yam" in many parts of Polynesia, including New Zealand. Naming Īlthough the soft, orange sweet potato is often called a " yam" in parts of North America, the sweet potato is very distinct from the botanical yam ( Dioscorea), which has a cosmopolitan distribution, and belongs to the monocot family Dioscoreaceae. Sweet potato cultivars with white or pale yellow flesh are less sweet and moist than those with red, pink or orange flesh. Its flesh ranges from beige through white, red, pink, violet, yellow, orange, and purple.
Sweet potato skin#
The edible tuberous root is long and tapered, with a smooth skin whose color ranges between yellow, orange, red, brown, purple, and beige. They close again in the morning and begin to wither. The flowers open before sunrise and stay open for a few hours. Seeds are only produced from cross-pollination. The two-chamber ovary is upper constant with a relatively short stylus. The enclosed stamens are of unequal length with glandular filaments. The 4 to 7 cm long, overgrown and funnel-shaped, folded crown, with a shorter hem, can be lavender to purple-lavender in color, the throat is usually darker in color, but white crowns can also appear. The small sepals are elongated and tapering to a point and spiky and (rarely only 7) 10 to 15 mm long, usually finely haired or ciliate. Some varieties rarely or never produce flowers. The hermaphrodite, five-fold and short-stalked flowers are single or few in stalked, zymous inflorescences that arise from the leaf axils and stand upright. However, these do not form underground storage organs. Some cultivars also form shoots up to 16 meters in length. Depending on the variety, the total length of a stem can be between 0.5 and 4 meters. The leaves are mostly green in color, but due to the accumulation of anthocyanins, especially along the leaf veins, they can be purple in color. Most of the leaf surfaces are bare, rarely hairy, and the tip is rounded to pointed. The leaf blades are very variable, 5 to 13 centimeters long, the shape is heart-, kidney- to egg-shaped, rounded or triangular and spear-shaped, the edge can be entire, toothed or often three to seven times lobed, cut or divided.
The stems are usually crawling on the ground and form adventitious roots at the nodes. The plant is a herbaceous perennial vine, bearing alternate triangle-shaped or palmately lobed leaves and medium-sized sympetalous flowers. batatas are grown as ornamental plants under the name tuberous morning glory, and used in a horticultural context. The genus Ipomoea that contains the sweet potato also includes several garden flowers called morning glories, though that term is not usually extended to I. aquatica "kangkong"), but many are poisonous. batatas is the only crop plant of major importance-some others are used locally (e.g., I. Of the approximately 50 genera and more than 1,000 species of Convolvulaceae, I. Sweet potato is native to the tropical regions of the Americas. Although darker sweet potatoes are often referred to as "yams" in parts of North America, the species is not a true yam, which are monocots in the order Dioscoreales.
Sweet potato is only distantly related to the common potato ( Solanum tuberosum), both being in the order Solanales. Cultivars of the sweet potato have been bred to bear tubers with flesh and skin of various colors. The young shoots and leaves are sometimes eaten as greens. Its large, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are used as a root vegetable. The sweet potato or sweetpotato ( Ipomoea batatas) is a dicotyledonous plant that belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, Convolvulaceae.
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