I have two sweet potatoes climbing up my trellis right now. I had to lean them onto it to get them started but now they are automatically climbing.

I don't know why you couldn't train them to climb. When I was a kid, my mom would put a sweet potato in water in a bean pot and set it on top of the refrigerator. The vine would trail down the sides and she liked it. She wasn't trying to grow more sweet potatoes, she just wanted the vine for decoration. Eventually the potato would rot away and the water, even though changed often, would get so stinky she would throw the whole thing away and start over. (It never occurred to her how wasteful that was, and she was a penny-pincher.) It seems to me that anything that will trail down will trail up.

If you're wanting to harvest sweet potatoes, though, I would recommend that you plant them in the ground or in a big enough pot to accommodate several big, fat potatoes. Otherwise your vine may die back when the potatoes get too big to be comfortable in the pot. --Ilene

I have some nylon netting I put up for the pole beans, but there are only a few of those. Can I tie up some of the sweet potato vines on the netting to help get them out of the way?

Yes, you can use the nylon trellis to train your sweet potato vines. They will have to be fed in and out of the openings in the trellis because they have no tendrils to help them attach to the trellis. I am doing this now and the vines are going crazy. I have to tuck the vines into the trellis every couple of days to keep them from falling over.

This plant's natural mission is to creep along the ground, constantly taking root, to make more potatoes. But if you guide it up, it will happily oblige. A very versatile plant for decoration. This planting is only about 2 months old, from cuttings.