How To Plant Potatoes
Today we’re going to learn how to plant potatoes. You can’t beat the fresh taste of taters out of your own garden, and they are one of the easiest veggies to grow, so if you’ve not planted potatoes before, give it a try.
This year we are planting 2 different varieties: Yukon Gold and Red Pontiac. They both store well and have great flavor. We bought our seed potatoes this year at a farm store, but you can get them at some grocery stores, farmer’s markets, or order them from seed companies.
First, cut up the seed potatoes making sure each piece has a good eye.
Speaking of good eyes, no job at our house goes unsupervised. Here, Kitty pulls double duty as Project Manager,
and Quality Control Officer.
So once you have all the spuds cut up, go to your garden. Mark off your rows and then dig holes about 2 feet apart and 6 inches deep.
Please each potato piece into its own hole, eye side up.
Cover all the baby taters with soil.
Depending on the weather, it can take weeks for your spuds to come up. We planted ours on March 18, and they still haven’t come up. But we expect them any day now.
After they come up, it’s just a matter of keeping them weeded and cultivated. They’ll bloom in June, and after that the plants will die back at which point they are ready to harvest, usually in July. If you can’t wait that long, you can dig up “new” potatoes when the plants are blooming. New potatoes are just baby spuds that the plant sets on when it blooms. If not harvested as new potatoes, they’ll mature and become the full-grown spuds you’ll harvest after the plants die back in July.
Check out my earlier post about harvesting spuds.
Now get out there and plant some taters!
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo
Can you use old potatoes from the grocery store (with ‘eyes’ on them), or do they have to specifically be ‘seed’ potatoes?
It’s best to use seed potatoes as they are treated somehow for potato blight.
I love Miss Kitty craning her neck to be sure all is right with that spud. She is a good inspector.
I just got home from the grocery store where I purchased potatoes for an outrageous $1.19 a pound!!!! And, I’m sure they will not begin to have the flavor of your good fresh potatoes. That’s what I get for not having a garden and not having a place to plant one!!!!
I wonder if potatoes could be planted in pots like tomatoes? Worth looking into if you have the room maybe?
I’m still waiting for mine to peek through…I planted on March 14th, so hopefully any day I’ll see green! You gotta love new potatoes and green beans, fresh from the garden. I can hardly wait! Your soil looks really nice…do you put lots of compost on your garden?
Thanks Alica. We put a load of old manure on the garden each fall and turn it in. But the soil here is also black and loamy anyway, some of the best I’ve seen. I tease Harland that when I first saw the soil I fell in love with him. 🙂
Don’t forget to throw in some ham with those green beans and new potatoes, Alicia. Probably my favorite meal in the summertime!
Good work, Harland. You did it just perfect. 🙂
Thank you Louise. But he couldn’t have done it without Kitty’s help you know. 😉
Love those little new potatoes boiled with lots of butter, salt and pepper!