This was a week ago... Getting bigger now...

Interesting plant... 100 gifted from a friend.

No idea ho this will go.

Post hole dug them 8" down in a 12" diameter hole. Great soil.

Never heard of planting potato plants.... or did I read this wrong.

Next is to figure out which technique you are going to use to preserve them.

I prefer pressure canning myself.

Old friend of mine used to grow potatoes in straw inside old tires. He'd keep adding tires on top and more straw as the plants got taller.

you need to dirt hill up every potatoe plant for them to produce well and water them alot. good luck

Our clay soil doesn’t work well when planting them using post hole diggers. Got to have soil a bit fluffier around here. Keep mounding dirt on the plants as they grow. Our taters are ready. Dug my first plant up yesterday. Don’t dig them up until the plants die. Save some for seed potatoes next year. Build yourself a root cellar up there in West Virginia to store them in. Something tells me you would enjoy that kind of project anyway!

This. When I was a kid we had an independent potato patch from the garden. Always saved back a bunch for the winter in tater bins in the basement. The rest got canned.

I'm glad I know how to do it but equally glad my potatoes come from the store now.

We have heavy clay soil as well, so to loosen, we add all the leaf rankings we can find. I also bag when mowing and dump that on the garden. The leaf piles in the fall are mounded up and then tilled in. Slowly, this has worked after a couple years and we have an awesome potato patch. The soil is much looser and is greatly helped by adding and tilling in organic matter. Weedseed free straw would also work. Avoid hay as it has seeds

I suppose you can plant and/or "transplant" potatoes. Never heard of transplanting them?

First off, potatoes don't do well in tight soil. You need a well drained, soft, sandy loam or conditioned soil.
You don't water potatoes. They'll rot in the ground.
When the plant comes up from the slip, start piling hay around the plants. The plant will stretch up to get out of the hay and form potatoes in the hay instead of underground.
Some folks use old tires to form raised beds to plant potatoes.
Taters love cooler weather.

Potatoes "used to" (?) be so cheap, growing your own was a waste of time and money.
Harvesting and storing potatoes is a lot of work and takes specialized locations.
Canning them is okay, but canning is a LOT of work....especially when you can buy a few at a time from the store.

I said it wrong... or goofy.

Put the potatoes in holes about a month ago... set a whole potato (... or two) about 8" deep in a 12" hole... backfilled about 1/2 the dirt...

They SEEM to be doing well... pushing the dirt up to even now.

I honestly have no idea what I am doing regarding potatoes.

Pretty fair on other stuff (propagation and growing), but potatoes are a new effort.

Thanks for the pointers guys.

10-10-10 fertilizer on hand... OK?

Are there any potatoes that are more like Yukon Golds that works with? From what I understand, that only works with bakers, like Idaho's.

Eight inches is WAY too deep.
I don't plant whole potatoes. Just cut the "eyes" off. You get a lot more plants that way.
Your fertilizer is fine, in limited amounts.

LOL, I helped my dad in his garden when I was a kid, he grew up on a farm and always had a big one. I remember digging potatoes, the trick was to get close enough so you'd get all the spuds with one forkful of dirt, but not so close that you'd spear a potato and ruin it.

Spearing a potato and getting "the look" was a no-go, so I probably dug twice as much dirt as I had to.

Being Ukrainian Slavyanka insists on planting potatoes. I don't have a root cellar but have a large landscaping pot that we bury them in sand in the garage.

How do you guys deal with the potato bugs? We've been hit hard a couple times and there a no (legal) pesticides for them here in Canada.

I've found that if I search the plants I can find one leaf that they've laid eggs on with each plant (on the underside). Pick that leaf and destroy the eggs and it seems to cut them back a lot.

Sorry but no idea what varieties he grew and never tried it myself.

Watch out for ants!


They got in my taters….

Yukon gold worse than red / new taters.

Some were unusable by the time i dig them.

Kennebec whites do OK in clayey soil.. I've been growing those for many years. Norland or Pontiacs for reds do well also. I still have about 10# left over from last year.. It's usually mid-July when they're all gone. Then it's 'store-bought' crap for a month until I begin digging the reds..

Pinch the flowers off .. more power to the taters... fluffy soil = more and bigger... hill the dirt around the base will k3ep the sun off the taters..

Not sure which bug you folks call "potato bugs", but have you tried dusting with diatomaceous earth? Spraying with a soap or nicotene based spray? Neem oil legal up there?

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

Some more

Not been real impressed with my row of potatoes.

And my reds never even sprouted. Some boolsheet dat is.

First time delving into potato husbandry. So whatever I get, will be my teachable experience.

Potatoes grow on trees. When ripe, they fall to the ground, and you collect them.

We have 8 rows, we usually buy potato seed. But this year used what we had from last years harvest. I just mounded two rows. Tomorrow need to mound the rest, need to haul compost mix with the dirt.

Slumlord my man! We had some that didn’t sprout I was like what the [bleep]! Damn you John burns damn you happy camper. I calmed myself I dug around the area of one I planted and sob potatoes growing. If you haven’t dig around one you planted see what’s going down.

WOW... some crazy cool stuff here.

Thanks for the intel and pics.

I have much to learn on taters.

The Campfire never fails to impress on knowledge... any topic... any zone.

And here I always thought potatoes were one of the easiest things to grow. I used to grow enough potatoes, carrots and onions so that I had enough when combined with my venison to last me all winter. Hanged the potatoes in burlap sacks down in the cellar and they'd last for months. Carrots and onions were tied in bunches by their tops with baling twine and hung in the cellar too. Potatoes are best when fresh out of the ground so used to leave them in the ground as long as possible, dig one hill at a time and use those up before digging more. We don't grow them anymore as I try to avoid eating too many carbs.

I've always used Sevin for tater bugs. Once or twice during the season was all they needed. Best fertilizer for them is one lower in nitrogen like 5-10-10. Phos and potash make the root/taters grow big. The nitrogen is more for what's above ground.

You got to think of your fertilizer as up down and all around... that's how the numbers work for what you want to plant to do anyway

One of the reasons that Idaho is famous for potatoes is sandy soil. In hard soil, spuds will grow funny bumps and dips. They're darn hard to peel. Sand produces nice smooth shapes.

Yep on both of those. Where I grew up potatoes were THE cash crop for all of the big farmers. Very little corn or soybeans or even cattle pastures.....everything was potatoes. I worked several summers in potato sheds and riding the harvester. At the same time all of the farmers lost their contracts with Frito Lay...not sure where Frito Lay moved the contracts to...but after that everything became corn and soybeans.

The way earlybrd shows is how they were done. Long raised rows so they don't sit in wet soil. The "digger" for harvest was a long linked belt that would go under the row. Potatoes would ride up on it and if you were riding the harvester you'd be picking our rocks, dirt clods, snakes, rats...anything that came through before the belt carried the potatoes onto the truck riding along. Once the truck was at the shed, the potatoes go down a long conveyer belt with eveyone picking out the "bad" ones or anything else that made it onto the truck. Then through the wash, dry, and bagged to be loaded.

The sandy soil Rock Chuck mentioned is true. Not only for the smoother potatoes but for making the rows and how the dirt would filter through the linked belt when digging. The place I grew up had nice loamy rich soil that was very fine....hardly any clay like the valleys around it. It's called Sand Mountain....and though the soil isn't true "sand" it does have a sand like texture.

Before I hoe all this jive again, I’ll get one of those row hiller disc thingie attachments.

Pic from this morning.

Glad I dont live in soviet socialist republic of canada…I’m going to dust the sheeyott out of these with 8 Dust (permethrin). I have ants and little beetles.




Row on the right played out and got patchy. Some of those gaps, sprouts never materialized. i didnt use “certified seed potatoes”. I just cut eyes on left overs from Peepaw’s grocery store

We have rocky, creek bottom soil, not sure how or if it will be friendly to potatoes.

An aside…I dug my footing to my house with a pick and a shovel. We didn’t have money for some lardass contractor to drill me for $1500 to dig my footers.

People get whiney around me, I tell them my hand dug footer story on 1600 sq ft home with I was 19 years old.
Oh you got Fortnite problems????

In the Pacific Northwest, I just throw the red and white potato peelings into my coffeeground and vegetable discard mulch piles.

Water them when its hot. Like a free potato farm.

Don't grow tomatoes next to them.

Nailed it .
Be careful with 10-10-10 , best intentions can send tears dow your little fat cheeks .
Kenneth

If you grow potatoes, never store them with apples. Apples produce some kind of gas that causes spuds to rot quickly.

I raised tators for a few years, but we got too much rain. This year would have been good.

I just found out that potato varieties are determinate or indeterminate kind of like tomatoes--in other words some varieties respond to hillling, others do not. The little reds I have grown for years do not need hilling.

Interesting......never heard of that. We always used an old John Deere lister we had around to create the rows/mounds before planting. Cut the eyes off of seed potatoes, plant the eyes and cover. Used the same lister to turn them over in the Fall.

Certified seed guarantees variety, nothing more.

Mom has claimed some store bought taters are treated to prevent sprouting.

We always used to bve sitting in the basement in January sprouting potatoes. Pulling sprouts off, tossing any bad ones. By late February the
ones left were soft and sprouted again. Those were left to sit. We bought
store potatoes if we ate any before harvest.

Come May, those wrinkled, sprouted taters were hauled out and we cut
then 2 eyes per chunk. In the ground untill fall.

I hated planting them. A bunch of work, and an inconsistent crop.
Usually good, but I remember one year planting 100# of seed potatoes,
And harvesting 2 1/2 bushels. Dang near just buried them and dug them
up. Not much increase for the sweat and money.

My brother is a great gardener, and he turned me onto the irish lazy bed way of planting potatoes. Looks to me to just be a raised bed method, but works really well. You might also be interested in a website called Back To Eden Gardening. Lots of good info.

hell ya

Not sure if it’s where the Idaho contracts went but the Hastings Florida area now produces a huge percentage of the chip potato crop. I remember about thirty years ago Frito-Lay coming in and offering huge contracts and everyone switching to small chip potato farming.

Off the top of my head, it was probably 25-30 years ago when it happened so I'd guess you're correct on that.

Old Virginia method on tomatoes is to put half a Bunker (Menhaden) at the bottom of the hole (deep hole)... for better yield.

We forgot this year... and have yet to harvest a tomato except for two cherries.

But this thread is a taters... so forget all that.

Exactly how we did it, always planted on a mounded up row, with a chunk of potato that contained an eye and used an old lister for making the row and for turning them over come harvest time.

Never heard of 'planting' them in a dug hole.

I've seen guys take an old tire, fill it with their soil mix and a chunk of potatoe. As the plant grows out of the tire, add another tire and more soil mix, and just keep adding tires and soil until the stack is head high. Then they'll knock the whole thing over and pick the potatoes off the ground. Heard of growing them in barrels in a similar manner. Just keep adding soil as the plant grows then dump the barrel over.

I like the cardboard dude.

It's useful for more than hobo hooches..

Get you some soap, terbacky juice, and diatomaceous earth. Quit using them damn chemicals and supporting big multi-national chemical companies. You're ruinin' Mother Earth dude.

Mine are finally starting to do well. Frosts in late June suck for gardening.



Went to the Big Town for some dental work the other day. Picked up a couple of things for the nearest neighbor. Dropped it off at his place when I got back and he told me we had two big dust devils come by while I was gone. He showed me the yard swing he set up for his wife and daughter, No awning over it any more. Sent me a pic. Tore it up good and even bent the supports for it. Then he tells me his wife saw cardboard flying all around and over the trees. Ripped it right off my plants in the garden. Found a couple of pieces of it up against the garden fence and the rest in the sagebrush and the bar ditch 50-60 yards away. Sure glad we don't get tornadoes here!

You can see a piece of cardboard with the cutouts up against the fence there. Good thing the plants weren't much bigger or it would have torn them up with the cardboard too:



Took it right off the broccoli and pepper row over there too, the near end piece was gone too but still within the garden so I was able to get that one back on quickly:



Taters from leftover ones in the well house are doing good in the backyard bed. A couple didn't come in, but that's OK. Judging by the cross the creek bed I should have plenty for the two of us and a few to give away. Barter goods for during the coming Food Shortages and Zombie Pokalips too.




Cabbages and Broccoli in the beds are coming along nicely:



I can't expect much better with the last frost just three weeks ago. Gotta get me a high tunnel or caterpillar tunnel when the economy comes back around. Let's Go Brandon.