Expert reveals hack for growing your own food from supermarket vegetables

A gardening expert has revealed a hack that allows you to grow your own food from supermarket vegetables.

A former garden manager for the Royal Horticulture Society and the National Trust has shared the secret to growing your own sweet potatoes after picking up a few from the supermarket.

Simon Akeroyd told his half a million social media followers that sweet potatoes are easy to grow yourself if you start with a few sweet potatoes that you can get in any supermarket. The first instruction is to rinse them before you find a container with holes in the bottom.

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Fill the container halfway with peat-free compost, then press two sweet potatoes into the compost. “Leave it on a sunny windowsill,” says Simon, “shoots (also called slips) will soon appear.

“Leave until the strips are 4 inches high, then carefully remove the sweet potato slices and drop them into water.”

A helpful video on the gardener’s Instagram page shows the shoots being dipped into pots of water, with the leaves emerging from the tops of the pots. Leave the shoots for two weeks until good roots have formed, says Simon.

Then ‘plant each sweet potato slip in a container and leave it on a sunny patio or in a conservatory’.

“Each slip should produce four to six sweet potatoes this summer,” Simon adds.