Potatoes

Does anyone have any tips on growing potatoes? This is my first shot at it. What do they like or dislike ? What critters do I have to deter? Companion plants? Thanks.

I'm growing some magnificent ones right now.

Companions - no tomatoes. Tomatoes and potatoes can share blights so if one gets the blight it can transfer to the other. Other than that, the usual suspects are OK. Marigolds to help deter potato bugs.

The absolute easiest, best happiest, most productive way to grow them is not to use any real soil. Dig a trench, or hole and fill it with sawdust, straw, or leaves. Put your starter taters in, about 18" apart. Cover about 2" with more straw, sawdust or leaves. Water regularly.

When your plants have developed some "legs" add more of your medium to mound up so that the leaves are still showing.

Keep on doing this until the potatoes die. Then just dig out your harvest.

You can also get a garbage bag full of leaves, put a potato in and start them that way.

In my garden right now, I have a 4' X 6' section with potatoes growing in leaves, on top of hay. The hay was from last year, and the leaves were just because I wanted to try the potatoes. The plants are about 2' tall and look gorgeous. I've had to do one mounding up, which was easy - just add more leaves. I don't have any rows, since I'm maximizing the space, so there are 12 plants in that small space. This should produce enough potatoes to feed half the neighborhood.

I'm doing the trash can method with leaves this year. I think I may have jumped the gun a bit and put them out too cold. It's been a couple weeks and no green growth yet. How long did yours take before showing?

Nanadee- there's also a thread on this in begginer veggtable that may help.

Actually, I think I jumped the gun too when I put them in. It took about 3 weeks for them to sprout, and then, when they were about 4" tall, there was a cold snap and they turned black. I pinched off the black leaves, continued to water, and begged them to please grow. Turns out that they were happy to comply.

I think that if you just leave them in there and keep taking care of them, that they will grow. The cool thing is that there comes a time when all of a sudden they start going nuts, and grow like wildfire.

I've read that potatoes like a pH of around 5.2, but my garden soil has a pH of 7.2. If I use the straw method, does that bypass the pH problem? Or is it still an issue because the roots are in the soil?

In other words, is scab caused by tubers coming in physical contact with soil with a higher pH or is it transmitted through the roots to the rest of the plant?

OK. I will make a confession. I have never ever done the PH thing on any of the potatoes that I have helped grow. However, when living in Maine, we grew taters in pure clay (the kind that turns into a white brick in the sunshine - nasty stuff).

We would dig a deep trench and fill it with sawdust, plant and stuff like above, and the taters would grow HUGE. We would often have some that one tater was enough to feed all four of us in the family, and no, it was not pithy.

The secret was that we were growing it in the sawdust, so even though the clay was as harsh as it gets, the actual growing medium was barely touched by the plants. We also never had scabs (unless the potato got injured - which did happen on rare occasions, like when the geese got into the garden), nor did they have any major pests other than potato bugs (and that's inevitable, I think).

Long story made longer - I think that as long as the growing medium is happy, and the plants have plenty of room to stretch out and grow the tubers, that the PH should not particularly matter. They will be growing in the medium, as you surmised, and so, even if they 'touch' the bad soil, it won't be all that big of a deal. Just make sure that there is plenty of straw/leaves/sawdust to give the plants a good place to stretch the roots out.

Oh, I'm sorry. I wasn't reading closely. Put the straw in and THEN put the starts in the hole. Big difference.

While I'm here, I'll ask about the sawdust. If someone's had a pile a sawdust in their woodshop for several months, can we say it's aged properly for gardening? Do you have any input on the length of time or has it has to be handled before you use it?

Thanks for your help! I hope to have lots of tator this year!

We used to get the sawdust every fall, and put it in in the spring, after it had a chance to get wet and settle through the winter. This leads me to believe that the sawdust you are getting should be more than adequate.

Hmmmm, interesting ideas for growing potatoes. We just tried them once, and were appalled at the invasion of Colorado potato beetles which seemed to come from nowhere and then attacked our tomatoes as well. We had never had them before. I've always been afraid to try potatoes again because of that. Maybe growing them in a container far away from the rest of the garden would work?

Colorado Potato Beetles (potato bugs in my personal vernacular) are the bane of every potato growers existence - at least up north (haven't gotten them down here in TX yet, but I'm still watching!.

When we used to see potato leaves, we would get a large amount of kerosene (about 5 gallons - we used it for other stuff too, though). Every day, either my idiot brother or myself would go and look under the leaves and see if we could see any eggs. If we found them (they're orange so they stood out), we would squish the eggs, or, if there was no way to get them all, we would pinch off the leaf.

We would still get the bloody beetles, and when we saw the adults, we would pour a small amount of the kerosene into an old can, and go through the potatoes, taking the beetles off the plants and putting them into the can of kerosene. They would die instantly, and we would usually harvest a good 1/3 can before we would use the kerosene soaked bugs on the trash fire (we had a barrel that we often burned icky paper and cardboard in - not to mention toilet paper. It wasn't particularly pleasant, but it saved a lot of trips to the dump and a fortune in septic work).

Seriously, every day, we were out there gathering the stupid beetles and the beetle larvae. We usually had pretty healthy potatoes, so I guess that the work we were doing helped. But man those things were hard to keep up with.

Definitely keep the potatoes and the tomatoes far apart from each other. And stay very, very vigilant! Those things get everywhere!

Hastur, I think I'll just buy my spuds, thankyouverymuch! There's enough work around here already without that. Unless - maybe if I put the container with the potatoes in the chicken yard? Would they eat the beetles, I wonder?

lol! I'd bet plenty of japanese beetles have met the same fate. I put them in soapy water, but some still tried to fly out. Let's see 'em try to escape from kerosene, ha!

Note to self: Orange eggs, potato beetles, squish 'em.

Well, Greenhouse Gal, I don't blame you. But I have to admit that the flavor of the homegrown, not to mention the ginormous, "HOW did you get them to grow that big!?" exclamations are good. *grin*

I have read somewhere about fabric that lets the light through, and I'm wondering if you couldn't cover potatoes with that. However, I have no real good idea if it would work or not.

The chickens won't eat potato beetles, in my personal experience, but it's worth a try. Our chickens were weird, so my own experience my be flawed by unusual birds. Ours would swim across a pond, for example, so they weren't the best critters to use as a good example of what a chicken would do. What's the worst that can happen? You have a potato bush that the chickens won't eat the bugs from, that you have to destroy. I would say test with one or two potatoes and see what happens.

Indy V - The fact that the beetles would try to fly out is why we ended up using the kerosene. Otherwise, the soapy water would definitely have been much friendlier to the olfactory senses.

Hastur- thank you. That gives me hope that my potatoes will be ok. I'm trying so hard to be patient this year. Not succeding too well with 60 degrees to 29. =)

Hi there Duchess. 60 to 29? As in 60 in the day and 29 at night? Wow. I knew that the desert had wild fluctuations, but wow.

Yah. The weather gets pretty wild in the spring. I should be used to it by now but it's always a guessing game. Supposed to be 80 tomorrow and down to 39 at night on Thrus. I never know what to wear this time of year ;) Lol.

Hastur you have verified that my chickens are REALLY weird. Yours won't eat potato beetles and I have watched mine eat snakes (not little ones) and mice. Both of which were alive and were chased down by the chickens. They are by no means starving either. I always wondered if they were normal...now I know. ~creepy~

Are you saying that yours WILL eat potato beetles?

Maybe it depends on how aggressive the variety is. Currently we have White Rocks and Silver Wyandottes, both of which harried last spring's chicks mercilessly and dug holes in the sides of some of their fellow chickens. I imagine they'd go for anything that didn't move quickly enough.

I don't know what mine won't eat. They finally stopped eating their own eggs. Every so often one would break an egg in the nest and then eat it. After a while they were just eating the eggs. We have all kinds. Rhoade island reds, buffs, big white ones w/ hairy legs (can't remember name), barrs etc...
I don't know if they will potatoe beetle but there is not much they won't eat.

Our birds were the fairly standard black chickens. Not too large or small, not particularly aggressive either. After the descriptions above, I'm thoroughly convinced that planting a couple plants where the chickens can police them, might be a very good experiment.

Definitely worth looking into.

Mine are not only eating their eggs but the goose eggs as well. We had to get artificial ones that we're using to replace the real ones until the goose starts setting - if she ever does. Talk about on-again-off-again! Maybe I will try a few potato plants in a barrel or something - far away from my regular garden.

Our poor goose never had a gander but she would try to lay a few eggs anyhow and we always had the hardest time trying to get her off of the nest. She would hardly eat and her poor little bill would turn pale. She just got so weak everytime she laid eggs we were afraid she would die.

I wish ours were so dedicated! I don't think the Toulouse really understands what all this is about. I'll think she's finally begin setting, and then I see her off in the pasture again. Neither Toulouse nor Chinese are supposed to be wonderful mothers, and that's what we've got.

Really? Ours is a chinese. Maybe setting a nest and actually taking care of the end result is something totally different.

We used to have normal and chinese geese. Man they were all annoying. Great egg layers but why did they have to stand under my bedroom window at 3am and practice how loudly they could honk?

They didn't eat the potato bugs either, although they could mow down a row of lettuce in about 3 minutes flat.

We have several ganders now and we call them the "mafia" they roam around together trying to be mean to the other critters. They also have a monopoly on the pond. Ours like to site under the dusk to dawn light and practice honking also.