This is why I didn’t plant potatoes last week. That would be snow on my flowering pear blossoms! Luckily this is Utah, and Spring snow doesn’t usually last very long (unless you remember two years ago when it snowed until the end of May…we still shudder at the memory). So I finally got around to planting my potatoes, and it makes me really happy! Potatoes are one of our favorite things to grow in our garden.
Potatoes are easy to grow, you just have to know a couple of things. Start with “seed potatoes” which are potatoes grown specifically for planting. Don’t plant potatoes you buy from the grocery store, they can carry disease and are usually treated with a chemical to inhibit sprouting. If I’m going to go to all the trouble of planting, watering, weeding, and caring about my little potato plants, I’m not going to plant something that might be diseased or might now grow well! I just don’t have time or energy for that. The potatoes we’re growing this year are Red Pontiacs and Cal Whites. We’ve also grown All Blues (which are really yummy and expensive to buy from the grocery store) and delicious Yukon Golds.
Regular seed potatoes are 79 cents per pound at Western Gardens. Fingerlings are $2.49 per pound.
The next step in potato planting is to cut the seed potatoes into pieces. Cut them about 1 1/2 inches thick, and make sure each piece has at least two “eyes” which should be just beginning to sprout. Then they need to heal for a couple of days in a cool area (about 55 degrees) with good ventilation.
Prepare your garden beds. Or in my case, clear out the weeds from last year. And the ones from this year. My favorite part about weeding the beds the other day was how enthusiastic my boys (ages 7 & 4) were about it! One of them made up a song about killing weeds, and they were entertained for at least an hour. Who knew it could be that easy?! When my 7 year old came home from school yesterday, he didn’t ask to play basketball, he asked to dig weeds! So I let him. It was glorious.
Next you need to amend your soil. It’s easy. All I did was call my husband, ask him to bring home some compost, watch him put the compost where I wanted it, and then watch him mix it in with the soil. See, nothing to it! We love Bumper Crop compost, once you try it you’ll never use anything else! Western Gardens carries it for $11.99 per bag, but if you buy 3 you get 1 free!
Once your soil is ready, dig a shallow trench and place your potatoes about a foot apart. Cover them with 4-6 inches of soil and give them some water. Potatoes like full sun, but they’ll tolerate a little bit of shade. Then just wait for them to grow! Once the plants get about a foot high, I’ll show you what to do with them next so you don’t get any green tubers!
When you cut your seed potatoes, be sure to get two eyes on each piece. If your potato is the size of a golf ball of smaller, it doesn’t need to be cut.
This is what they looked like right after I cut them.
This is what my potatoes looked like two days after I cut them.
The sprouts look kind of cool!
When we were preparing our planting beds, we found a couple of potatoes that we missed last year. One didn’t survive my 4 year old helper, but I stuck the other one back in the ground!
Bumper Crop is awesome stuff!
Two things that make me happy in April: Planting potatoes, obviously, and the fact that we had a few days of flip flop and shorts weather!
Stick your potatoes in your trench in about a foot apart. {The dirt on the right was mixed with the compost, we hadn’t mixed the dirt on the left yet}
Cover them up, water them, and then (if you have automatic sprinklers), just ignore them for a while! It will take about 100 days until they’re ready to harvest. But it’s worth the wait. Promise.
This was quite possibly my favorite part of planting potatoes! Watching a 4 year old boy discover his first worm of the year. Perfect.
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