I’m obsessed with potatoes. I think my kids and I could eat them at every meal and never get tired of them. Remember that scene in Forrest Gump when Bubba starts listing every shrimp dish he can think of? That’s me…but with potatoes.
Potato Salad, Potato Soup, Potato Skins, Twice Baked Potatoes….
Thank goodness they are so easy to grow.
Even though I’ll probably never be able to grow enough potatoes to feed my family year round (I still need to buy plenty from the store) I do love growing many varieties in the summer and pulling them fresh from the ground to make my favorite dishes.
French Fries, Curly Fries, Cajun Fries, Waffle Fries…
The first thing you should know is that potatoes are not really grown from seed; they are grown from other potatoes. That’s right – no little packet of seeds. Potato seeds are really just a potato from last year’s harvest. If you order your potato seeds online, you’ll get a little bag in the mail that appears to hold potatoes like you buy at the store.
When you receive your potatoes in the mail, open them up, and examine them for sprouts. They should already have 3-5 sprouts on each one. You can use these whole potatoes, but here is a great trick to maximize your harvest: using a knife, cut the potatoes so that each piece has a sprout and then leave them in the sun for a day until the flesh sides have browned a bit and dried over.
With that simple tip, you just quadrupled the number of potato starts you purchased. Each one of these new pieces will produce as much as the origin potato seed would have!
Potato Chips, Potato Pancakes, Potato Latkes, Hashbrowns…
Now you are ready to plant. You can certainly plant your potatoes directly in the ground or in a garden bed. I’ve had plenty of success with that. But here’s the thing: potatoes grow underground and you can’t see them. When I go to dig them up, I often slice right through them with my shovel and maybe even miss a few that were growing outside of where I thought they were. So now I plant them in big pots in the ground. That way, when I’m ready to harvest, I just pull out the contents of the pot, or dump it if I can lift it, and sift through until I find all the potato treasure (kids love doing this by the way!)
To get started, use either a large terra cotta pot, or a plastic pot with a large hole cut in the bottom with a piece of chicken wire or hardwire cloth over it.
A terra cotta pot will naturally allow underground water in to feed your potatoes, so a plastic pot will need a more open bottom for the same purpose. Make your life easy by burying a soaker hose nearby.
Next, mix a large container of garden soil and peat moss. I normally mix in some composted manure too. Put about 2 inches of this mix in the bottom of your pot (if you are doing this in a garden bed or just in the ground in your yard, dig a hole about 16” deep and proceed). Next lay your potato seeds on top and give them about 12 square inches each. Cover them with the soil mix so you can’t see the seed but you can see the sprouts if there are any. Water well.
In just a few days, you’ll see green leaves poking out!
Now you need to start “mounding.” New potatoes will form all the way up the stem, so mounding soil around the plants as they grow dramatically increases your harvest. Every few days, take more of your soil mix and fill the pot so that only the top few leaves are showing. Yes, it’s okay to cover all the other leaves!
Potatoes auGratin, Hasselback Potatoes, Tatertots, Roasted Potatoes…
Once the leaves reach the top of the pot (or the top of the hole you dug), just keep going! Mound the soil mix up until you can’t really go further and then just leave it alone to keep growing – usually about a foot. Keep it watered. Add a little fertilizer every two weeks.
When the potato plants produce a little flower, that means potatoes are growing under all that soil. Yay!
At some point during the summer, the potato leaves will begin to die off and that’s how you know it’s time to harvest! But you can also cheat. I just can’t wait until fall to harvest all my potatoes, so I regularly sneak into the pots and pull out a few potatoes that are not full size, and you can too!
You can plant potatoes anytime once you are past the frost date in your area and continue to plant until 70 days before your first frost of the fall. So don’t wait to try this – Bubba would be proud of you!
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Toni, my carrots just produced a little flower. Does that mean the same thing as when potatoes produce a flower? That they are growing? And I should wait until the leaves die down to pull the carrots up?
Nope! Totally different. To check if you carrots are ready, just pull one up! If it looks to be the right size and tastes good, you can harvest them all or harvest over the coming weeks as you need carrots.