March 9th, 2023
It may feel like the winter weather will never let up, but planting season is just around the corner! And whether you have a green thumb or have never grown a thing in your life, this is the perfect year to gear up your garden with some new gardening know-hows.
Gear Up Your Garden: Potatoes
If there’s one plant someone can grow by mistake, it’s a potato. All you have to do is forget about it for a few weeks, and the next thing you know, there’s more eyes in the room than you can hide from. Whether you want to capitalize on your mistake or simply grow them on purpose, here are some tips you don’t want to forget.
- Choose a source. If you don’t want to buy a bag of seed potatoes, you don’t have to. The term “seed potato” simply means they’re sold to use as seeds. You’ll get the same results if you purchase potatoes from the supermarket and leave them in a cool, dark place. If you choose to buy normal potatoes, be sure to wait until they have sprouted to use them in the garden.
- Maintain ideal soil conditions. Potatoes prefer sandy and rich, well-drained soil in order to grow and spread out easily without the threat of disease from excess moisture. It’s best to avoid rocky or clay ground types. After planting, your tubers should be watered every four or five days for the first six weeks and every other day after that.
- Mound determinate varieties. Indeterminant potatoes (Yukon Gold, Red Pontiac, Russet Burbank) grow in bushy layers along the ground, able to produce in as little as four inches of soil. However, determinant potatoes grow up and down and require the dirt to be mounded around them multiple times—as often as it takes to cover the roots and young spuds and for the stems to stay upright without snapping off.
- Observe closely for pests and disease. As hardy as this vegetable is, it can still become infested by potato beetles, blight, or other molds and fungi. In a matter of just a few days, the whole crop may be lost. If your plants look hole-filled, overly dry, yellow, or spotted before harvest time, there’s a good chance something is wrong. It’s best to know the signs and how to come to your potatoes’ rescue long before you ever need to. For more information, visit Sustainable Market Farming.
- Harvest after the bush has died. Sometimes, your plants will take more or less time to mature than the projected days on the seed bag. If the greens are drying up, turning yellow then brown, and it’s not due to moisture levels, prolonged heat, or disease, then they’ve likely finished early. To maximize production, let the greens die off completely before harvesting (unless the soil is overly wet, which would cause rot to set in early).
Growing Ideas
- The Cozy Bucket Method. What would gardening be if we couldn’t downsize it to fit our growing needs, especially as the desk-cramped professors, faculty, and students that we are? Due to obvious space reasons, it’s not recommended to place potatoes in a gallon-sized bucket, but a five-gallon bucket can provide for two plants. Be sure to keep the soil within the same parameters as you would an in-ground garden, and punch holes in the bottom of the container for draining excess water. Leave them somewhere sunny and watch the magic happen!
- The Wilderstead Potato Tower Method. Homesteaders from the YouTube channel Wilderstead walked their viewers through an interesting space-saving method. Using a four-foot tall, small-squared wire fence, create a circle two or three feet in diameter. For stability, you can ziptie the tower to a metal T-post. In the center, place a 2” wide plastic abs pipe. They recommend a blend of topsoil, compost, and peat moss to fill the tower, watered down before using. Next, alternate layers of dirt with potatoes and straw around the abs pipe. Don’t worry about packing the layers down as they will compact naturally. Then, watch as the greens sprout from the sides, allowing for maximum use of your gardening area.
—Grace Desotell, Gardening Editor