Growing Potatoes

There’s nothing like the taste of freshly dug potatoes and the knowledge that they’ve been grown in a pesticide-free environment in their own backyard. Potatoes grow best with at least 6 hours of full sunlight. Potatoes, like other root crops, thrive in slightly loose soils with good drainage. Soil that contains too much water can lead to disease and rot. Down to compost or cover crops to ensure there is enough organic matter for a good soil structure. Acidic soil helps protect the potato from fungal diseases.

Do not be tempted to grow potatoes from old potatoes from the grill, as they will not produce reliable crops. As the growing season progresses, create small hills for your potato plants to ensure the potatoes stay covered. Normally I use free wood chips as mulch, but straw also works very well. To plant using the non-digging method, all I do is plow a very shallow trench (usually only 1/2 to 1 inch deep, in the cut and cured seed potatoes, covering with rich soil. Place your plant potatoes one to two weeks before the planting date in an area where they are exposed to light and temperatures between degrees F. A day or two before planting, use a sharp, clean knife to cut the larger seed potatoes into smaller pieces.

As a result, seed potatoes are usually not planted in their entirety. Instead, they are cut into pieces before planting to produce more plants of each seed potato. Usually, they are rescued from last year’s harvest and stored during the winter in demanding conditions to keep them firm and disease-free. Kartoffeln anbauen Instead of saving some of your own crop to replant next year, I recommend buying new certified disease-free plant potatoes at the beginning of each growing season. Wherever you choose to grow your potatoes, covering potato plants with loose organic matter is essential for good potato development.

Narrower distance helps maximize space and reduce water loss. With the rows, dig a trench about 6 to 8 inches (15-20 cm) deep and fill it only partially when planting. With other methods, plant the potatoes around ground level, then collect soil as they grow. Whatever planting method you use, the steps are similar.

Instead of making hills out of these potato plants, gardeners at the Wishard Slow Food Garden in Indianapolis laid straw around the plant stems. This potato plant blooms, indicating that tubers are forming underground. Keep plants well watered during and after flowering. Potatoes grow best in loamy, aerated, well-drained soils. Heavy clay soils and soaked soils are the least hospitable to potatoes. To prepare your potato bed, add a lot of old compost and organic matter: leaves and grass clippings.

Basically, use a shovel or hoe every three to four weeks to stack the nearby soil against the stems and cover the plants so that only a few leaves protrude from the top. Don’t worry about burying it too deeply; as long as part of the plant is visible, it will continue to grow. Potatoes are susceptible to many diseases, including potato crust and potato blight, which can be easily introduced into the garden by planting your own rescued tubers. White potatoes, red potatoes or potatoes with yellow flesh or red skin do not differ from potatoes with any number of peels or interiors of different colors.

While the traditional trenching method is still superior, you can still get lucky growing potatoes in grow containers or bags. Be sure to water regularly and keep the soil moist, as the soil in the container dries out much faster than the soil in the ground. Instead of planting the potatoes deep at first, gardeners overcome this challenge by mounting excess dirt around the plants as they grow.