Planting Potatoes

The first time I grew potatoes was two years ago.  Never having grown potatoes before I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  If you look up how to grow potatoes you will find there are as many ways to plant potatoes as there are varieties of potatoes.  You can grow them in buckets, in tires, or in straw.  You can plant them shallow and hill them up as they grow, or plant them deep and fill in the holes as they grow.  Any way you do it the basic concept is to let them grow, but make sure that you cover the base of the plant to make sure that the potatoes don't see daylight - plant them too shallow and you will have green skinned potatoes (which should not be eaten).

Potatoes are actually related to tomatoes and they will make little round green fruits, but I don't think that the fruits are edible (and I wouldn't advise trying to eat them).  I've come across a few websites that will actually sell potato seed, but what they are usually referring to are seed potatoes which are nothing more that potatoes with eyes that are growing sprouts.  You can cut a sprouting potato into several "seeds" and each one will grow into a new plant and make more potatoes (as long as there are one or two sprouts per chunk).

The first year I attempted to grow potatoes in deep holes.  I prepared the bed in the usual way by turning over the soil and mixing in some compost.  Once I decided how far apart I should plant my potatoes I dug a hole about 9 inches deep for each one, set one little potato chunk in each hole and covered them all with about 3-4 inches of dirt.  Does this leave deep little holes all over my potato bed?  Yes.  But it does make watering them a little easier since you don't really have to guess where you planted anything. I also had to make things extra difficult for myself because I had decided to interplant onions with the potatoes that year.  When it came time to fill in the holes little by little the growing onions tended to get in the way.

Once the potatoes were big enough and the holes were level with the rest of the garden it was just a matter of time until we could harvest.  The hardest thing about growing potatoes is knowing when to pick them.  It is hard to tell how big they are when they are underground, and you don't want to dig up the whole plant just to find out if it is ready because you might kill it.  I've been told that you can dig up one side of the plant and pick all the potatoes that you see, and come back later to get the rest.  I tried it and all I can say is that if you dig up one side of the plant you might as well dig up the whole thing.  They never seem to recover from the shock which probably means that the potatoes that were left in the ground won't get any bigger and might start to rot.

I do have to say that our very first harvest was quite impressive.  One of the first potatoes we picked was about the size of a soft ball and weighed at least two pounds.  We had several more that were also quite large.  We also learned that picking potatoes is something of an art.  You can pick them any time after the plants have flowered, but for big potatoes you wait until the plants die back.  When you go to dig them out of the ground you have to estimate how big you think the plant is underground and start digging far enough away from the plant that you don't pierce any potatoes with your digging fork.  We learned that lesson several times the hard way as we dug up our first crop.  Luckily you don't have to throw away those pierced potatoes, just make sure they get used pretty quick which is easy to do in our house.  We love potatoes for breakfast, lunch or dinner.  In fact we got so spoiled on our fresh home grown potatoes we were quite disappointed when we ran out of them and had to go back to using store bought potatoes.