Potatoes: A Complete Planting Guide

The How Do Gardener ^ | January 18, 2012 | Rick Bickling

[orsonwb]

A complete planting guide for potatoes including state specific varieties, planting dates, days to harvest, nutrition facts, fertilizing, watering, insect and disease information.

[JustaDumbBlonde]

Ping to our gardeners out there!

Thanks to Free Vulcan for the heads up.

[Robert357]

Bump for reference. Thanks

[ApplegateRanch]

Thanks; I’m adding this to my gardening links.

The also have other veggies & veggies related pages via their search & side bar.

[JDW11235]

When you take them out of the cellar, where do you put them? In water, in the light inside, or outside, or just anywhere? This (last) year was my first year planting potatoes as an adult. I tried with my dad once as a kid, but had no luck because of the soil. He preferred to pay the 50 cents for the sack of potatoes from the store, lol. Not so with the good stuff like tomatoes, squash and watermelon. Those I had to slave in the hot Las Vegas sun for. But I wouldn’t give up working with my pop for anything!

[Altariel]

What’s taters, Precious?

[hattend]

BTTT

[Kartographer]

*Po-tay-toes!* Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew... Lovely big golden chips with a nice piece of fried fish.”

[Vendome]

can’t you wait until the things grow eyes and legs, cut them into pieces and toss them in the ground?

Seems pretty straightforward.

Then again, I’ve never done it but, I do know it all. /S

[Redleg Duke]

Excellent reference! Thanks!

In this Obama Recovery, the home garden is going to be critical!

[Drill Thrawl]

You may want to add a good amount of sand\compost\vermiculite to you soil. It would give you better drainage to avoid rotting but still retain some mositure during any dry spell you may get.

I LOVE new potatos. Bake baby russetts (about 1 to 1.5 inches in size) sprinked with sea salt. Yummmmmeeeeeee!

[sneakers]

I guess my potatoes won’t be any good then. I decided to try an experiment. I live in zone 5. Temps are around 20 - 35 degrees. In November, I planted some potatoes that had eyes. I planted them about a foot deep in a raised bed. First I put leaves, compost and dirt in the trench, planted the potatoes, then put more leaves and compost and covered them with dirt. Now covered in a dusting of snow. Is there any chance they will grow? I figure, if they don’t, I haven’t lost anything! I was going to put straw on them. Will that make a difference?

[Mrs. Don-o]

Thank you.

As Gollum says, "Taters, precious!"

[martin_fierro]

Tuber or not tuber.

That is the question.

[KosmicKitty]

I’ve had good luck using grow bags I got from Gardener’s Supply

Very easy to harvest

[TASMANIANRED]

I think it depends on your freeze depth.

Anything below the freeze line may be just fine.

One of the video’s that I watched had a guy in upstate NY, he put a ton of mulch over his beds and then burlap and let them store in the earth.

Dug them up as needed..

[TASMANIANRED]

The ones that froze will likely got to compost.

The ones that didn’t will sprout and your potato bed will be a lot bigger than last year.

[martin_fierro]

[ChocChipCookie]

Potatoes are a pretty easy-to-grow calorie crop. We’re planning on planting them in barrels this year.

[WorkingClassFilth]

My soils tend to be heavy clay - not the potatoes favorite soil. We lighten with compost and humus builders and try to deep dig with a U-bar before tilling. After the furrow is in, I add a fair amount of peat to what will become each hill. Stock is prepared by shaded light exposure in the house (brought up from the cellar) to let eyes develop. If I cut the tuber, I tumble it in a bag with peat moss to stick to the wound and let them scab over for a day or two before going into the ground. When the stock is planted, I amend with a little ag sulpher thrown into the usual fertilizer blend to help drive down the pH. Soil soaker hose down the row and gradual burial with a mulch/soil alternating top dressing to give greater room for potatoes to stretch out as they develop.

Even with all this dinging around, my yields are smaller than I greedily hope for every year and I’m not really sure what I should realistically expect in my conditions. By NO means am I a potato expert and I dream of the day when I magically transform my Minnesota clay into fertile Idaho loams heaped with beautiful piles of dee-licious potatoes.

Oh well, the German Butterballs and the Finnish Gold made for some darned fine eating last year. This year, though, is the year of the perfect potato chip (fried in lard, of course).

[JDW11235]

Hey, now there’s an idea. We have had to dig a few holes in the winter here, and I don’t remember the ground being really tough in the garden, so maybe it didn’t freeze to deep. I never thought of the mulch, so I appreciate the mention. I’ll have to look into that. We were thinking of burying buckets, etc, and putting the potatoes in them, with mulch on top, but decided it was more work than we wanted to try. Maybe the method you described could work. Now if only I could get tomatoes year round! (We do pick them green before the frost, and let them ripen, so I get garden tomatoes into November, but this year the frost hit them early, and only about 1/4 of the ones we picked for winter ripened before they rotted. I was very sad.)