Filed under: Gardening, Potatoes | Tags: Potatoes, pacific northwest winter gardening, pacific northwest gardening, Planting Potatoes, growing potatoes, fresh garden potatoes, organic potatoes
This is the third year I’ve planted potatoes in my garden, so I’m still learning. The first year I tried potatoes was a bit of a fluke. Tomato Man loves potatoes. He will take them in any of their various forms: baked, mashed, fried and boiled. We always have a lot of store-bought potatoes on hand to feed his hunger. Sometimes those store-bought potatoes don’t get used up quickly enough, sprout and end up in the compost.
On one such occasion, I chose to plant the sprouting potato in the garden just to see what would happen. In a few weeks, I had a potato plant and a husband filled with great anticipation for the end product. Thus our love of garden fresh potatoes began.
I began to research ”how to plant potatoes correctly”. Here is the process I came up with from multiple gardening and seed potato resources:
- Use seed potatoes, preferably from an organic grower. You can use the sprouted store-bought potatoes but they very well might have a “growth-inhabiting” spray on them that may impact the number of potatoes they will produce. My observation was that the seed potatoes from the organic grower foster an abundant crop of potatoes that grew in season and then naturally overwintered as my Potato Miracle entry described.
- Cut the seed potatoes into chunks that have three eyes or sprouts per chunk. This will increase your number of potato plants as well as making sure each plant has enough room to grow all the potatoes it can.
- I plant potatoes one foot apart in all directions. This is an intensive gardening method that has worked well for me.
- For each potato, dig an 8 inch hole.
- Place the seed potato in the 8 inch hole and cover it with 3 inches of soil.
- Check each “potato hole” each day to see if the sprout has come up through the soil. When it does, cover it with another 2-3 inches of soil until the 8 inch hole is filled to the top.
- As the potato plant grows to the surface, continue to hill up the soil around it to encourage growth of potatoes.
When the potato plant flowers, you can dig around the soil at the base to see if there are any baby potatoes to eat. Potatoes take about 90 days to mature. The longer you leave them in the ground, the larger they will get. Before the first hard frosts come, pull up the plant to harvest the potatoes.
If you leave potatoes in the ground for the winter, they may sprout in the spring as my potato miracle proved! This year I plan to experiment with overwintering so as to be grilling fresh potatoes earlier in the season next year.
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