Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Never done potatos before

Heavy, coarse mulch around the plant helps keep them down, I seem to recall.

Not water taters?

Yesterday it was 95F + with a humidity of around 10% and it sometimes doesn't rain here for 90 or may days at a time. I don't water my taters I don't get any taters.

Mine are just coming up. Plant any earlier and late frost gets them. Last frost was just a week ago. Some volunteers that came up in the beds got frost burned on top.

I've done good with Modoc variety, and early variety as we have short seasons, here in my clay volcanic soil with a lot of compost added. To keep moisture in, I plant through holes in cardboard boxes. 4" or so of composted chicken Gulag straw and lawn clippings, cardboard, more compost straw on top when they get growing.



This bed was tomatoes, but same for the taters and cabbage etc. Keeps weeds down and moisture in.




From May 21 2020, just getting started.



And why we need short season varieties here. Same bed, June 8, snow in it with some frost burned plants:



Sept 2020, partial harvest, I got close to 30lbs from one bed

I built up a mound of potting soil in a raised bed made of railroad ties in the back yard and planted some spropted eyes from store bought taters. Just as the green shoots broke ground, an armadillo found the loose soil and made it look like the craters of the moon. They're still growing, but it looks like several plants got uprooted. Dang it!

Diatomaceous earth hasn't worked, neither has soap. Neem oil and nicotene-based sprays aren't approved/available.

Slavyanka gets her mother to send her something from Ukraine that works, but who knows how long we'll be able to get that?

Know any smokers? Make your own nicotine juice?

Good luck with it. Maybe a floating row cover put on before the plants come up to keep the adults from getting to the leaves to lay eggs?

By potato bugs, do you mean these?

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=striped+potato+beetle&ia=web

Boil a pouch of cheap pipe tobacco in a gallon of water and strain the solids out with cheesecloth to make your own nicotine based spray. A bag of Red Man chew would probably work, also.

Wow, neem oil banned? That's hard core.

Interesting how techniques change by region. We typically plant our in late February to mid March. Frost will sometimes knock them down, but they rebound nicely. Mine are ready to be harvested, with the exception of a few that I planted late. Ours looks like a bumper crop.

Cash you are an Irishman at heart.
It is a green thumb that you have for growing those lovely potatoes.

LOL...

I do figs, blueberry TREES (20 footers), kiwis and fair bit of other stuff (Peaches, Apples, Pecans, Butternuts, Chestnuts, Camelias etc. etc.)... give started plants/stuff away is kinda a hobby.

I am more of a madman than an Irishman... but thanks for the compliment.

Peach pits and other stuff come from my moonshiner friends... full circle kinda thing.

I quit growing potatoes when they banned Thiodan. I can’t find anything else that will get rid of those damned potato bugs.

The "doctor of dirt" (Howard Garrett?) suggests "orange oil" as an insecticide. It's organic.
I use DE (diatomaceous earth) quite a bit. It's tough on bugs AND it's good for your soil.

That's them, Valsdad.

Good idea on the nicotine juice, HL. I've got a buddy who goes to the US regularly and keeps me and another buddy supplied with pipe tobacco. It's outrageously expensive up here - $35-45 for 2 ounces!!!!

I’ve had good luck with them here, but the last 4 or 5 years have been too wet.

Wetter than Ireland?

I heard tell they grow taters there.

Or used to, maybe that's what caused the famine, too much rain.

Leonard,

I grew a lot off potatoes in Virginia. Bugs never really bothered them. 10-10-10 and Alaska fish fertilizer are my go-too. There are likely better options but, like you, I use what I have on hand.

Once they finish flowering you can start harvesting as needed. The greens will eventually look like hell. That is normal. Pull them all out as the plants start to die off.



Also +1 to this:

I grew up in central ND, sandy soil in the higher garden , sandy/river-bottom loam down over the bluff in the old river-bed, where we had one of the gardens. We always had at least a half acre of spuds, up to an acre, good production, stored in basement bins over the winter. Don't recall ever watering them, but probably did. Temps were often 90-100; didn't seem to hurt the taters any.

I do remember moving sprinklers around the garden, but not the taters specifically. Hoe-ed weeds, mounded, and dusted pestucude for bugs, yes. Often ran a herd of 20-30 white turkeys through the garden twice daily for grass-hoppers. I hated those damned birds (totally untrainable or manageable), but hoppers once removed are quite digestible.. . I'm hard put to decide which I hated worse- pigs or turkeys, which are on opposite ends of the animal intelligence spectrum. (I was too smart for one, too dumb for the other )

The birds were crazy for grass-hoppers, and it cut the feed bill considerably. We wuz "green' before it was a fad, or even identified. I wasn't born cheap- I was raised that way!

We had a home built row-marker with 3 or 4 teeth to drag row lines in the soil. Left-over taters from year before were cut with 2 eyes to the piece, and planted with a nifty device- commercial, but I have never seen another. It was basically a 4" tube about 30 inches long, with open top end with a handle. The bottom was a spring-loaded alligator snout, with a foot in front of it. Just walk down the row, with a sack of cuts on one's hip, dropping a seed into the planter with every step, jabbing it into the ground, pushing forward and lifting up. That dropped the seed into the hole created. Your next step came down on it and sealed it, about 3 inches deep, as you did the next seed-plant. Get the rythem right and one could plant a hellacious amount of potatoes in a day!

We fertilized with chicken manure- composted was best. Fresh stuff can get chancy if you use too much.

Taters will grow damned near anywhere- from a coal-ash pile (I dumped some left-over seed there, once, in ND.), to essentially straight peat, on my brother's land outside of Fairbanks. My soil here is about 18-24 feet of clay/silt/loamy stuff ( commonly referred to by some, when wet, as "loon shiett) over a layer of sand. Best to mix it up thouroughly using a backhoe or such, to 3 feet deep or so for good garden soil. Add a little of Ironbender's finest composted horseyshitt and I should be golden!. Next year, I'll have enough garden space, I hope, to plant a few taters. Gotta do some clearing first.

I grew a nice crop in Galena some years ago, after tilling up the scraggly lawn in front of the apartment of fairly heavy Yukon River flood-plain silt-soil.

Hell even the over-populated Irish could grow them, using Joe Biden's "planting tips for farmers". Until the blight caught up with them.

And that's how America got starving Irish up the ying-yang.......

Once you have potato scab, or blight, in the soil, you are so fugged. Best to rotate potato patches annually, or even tri-annually also.

Of course, YMMV for productivity, depending on soil, season, climate, and annual weather, care, etc. I read somewhere that in SA, where potatoes originated, the locals would grow several varieties at different locations/elevations, minimizing the chance of catestrophic crop failure due to seasonal weather, etc.

Try dusting some of the plants with lime.
That's what my Pap used before he got a sprayer.

Go easy, too heavy will hurt the plants.
And if you are a "Good Bug Lover" it doesn't discriminate.

Growing your own ammo for potato guns?
https://mooncannon.com/

Here’s how it’s done the right way and hilled up if you plant them early enough once they bloom let them go and you’ve got taters dig them around September