Volunteer Potatoes?

Last year was my first time to plant irish potatoes. Today I was pulling some grass clumps to make room to plant more potatoes. I have three double rows of volunteer potato plants up! And yes, they must be making potatoes. The first plant I discovered was in the middle of a grass clump, and only 2 inches high, so I only noticed it because there were three small red potatoes in the dirt clump underneath!!!

I am pretty excited. Let's say I conveniently accidentally missed a few eating potoatoes when digging las fall LOL But now i also have some concerns:

Anybody know if I should lremove them or let them grow?

What about diseases?

They were in the ground all winter, will they produce?

This means i will have some even earlier potatoes, *GRIN*. I am one happy camper, but please bust my bubble is necessary. I garden organically, and don't want to make a poor decision that would affect the future of my soil's integrity, am I saying that right?

They were from certified seed LAST year. All Red, All Blue, and Kennebec...

As long as you didn't have any disease problems last year it should be ok to let them grow. You may want to thin a bit if you left a large number of tubers in the ground though. They should indeed produce. What you've done is basically exactly what would happen in the wild :-)

One word of caution: if any are growing from actual seeds produced by aboveground flowers, rather than from belowground tubers, they will not grow 'true' to their parent variety. They'll certainly still be potatoes, but they could have some different characteristics as far as things like color, starchiness, etc. go. Only plants grown from tubers will be exactly the same variety year after year.

This message was edited May 17, 2005 10:34 PM

Thanks for the reply, I didn't want to have to dig them up. There are wild gourds growing there as wel, I suppose they will be dug up though. Mine didn't produce any seed, so we're on the safe side. And I didn't miss too many, so I have room to plant more in between. No disease or pests last year either.

So I guess I am gonna have some extra taters, Yahooooooo!

BTW, "wild" is a good way to describe how I garden LOL

Tamara

I remember one year when I was a kid. We always planted lots of potatoes.
We planted our usual patch. A few weeks later my dad cleaned out the basement what was left that we didn't eat or plant. He just tossed them on top of a load of manure and spread them out in the field. This field was then plowed & tilled & planted to corn. That fall when we went to harvest the corn, there was this beautiful bunch of potatoes. The ones in the garden had dried up due to a very dry summer.
Potatoes very seldom grow from seeds, so I would imagine these are from tubers you missed last year. Enjoy your "early" potatoes!
Bernie

What a neat memory Bernie. Bet those potatoes loved the irrigation the corn left over, and the shade too!

I also emailed the place I bought my seed potatoes from, www.milkranch.com, and this is his reply:

"Yes, you can let them grow. One reason for not letting them grow is to give the soil a break from the potatoes and to build the fertility. Another reason is to prevent disease and pest populations from growing in that same spot. But, as long as your observations show healthy potatoes, you can keep it up."

Craig D. Rockey
Milk Ranch Specialty Potatoes, L.L.C.
craig@milkranch.com
www.milkranch.com
970-641-5634


So far the consensus is to let em grow and enjoy them! I will even palnt some more taters or beans in between, since there is plenty of space.

Anyone else have this experience?

Yes, Tamara, I have often had a few volunteer potatoes come up in the Spring. Sometimes I let them grow and sometimes they get hoed out. But I'm in favor of leaving them and looking on them as a bonus and seeing what I get later in the summer when I dig them.

...cool...

RE: Companion Planting Beans in the Pototoes.... Just climbers I presume and did you trellis them?

Drew

NO, bush, and they go in between... WHY?