Potatoes

“What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.”

- A.A. Milne

Agreed.

But how does a fellow know when or how to dig them up?

Well, to borrow a prairie phrase, what a guy could do is dig them all now or let them sit for a bit.

We have the Northwest luxury of planting another round of lettuce and some fall and winter crops, so we wanted to get those potatoes out of the road and make room.

If you’re in a cooler climate and the potatoes will be the last crop your garden patch will see, you can let the plant hang out for a while. You want to dig them all up before it freezes, but in the meantime you can just rob individual potatoes as you need them. The rest of the potatoes will be happy enough down there.

Either way, you know your potatoes are ready to dig when the plant looks like crap.

An eyesore.

The tops of the plant will have turned brown and the stems will be all bendy and floppy. If it looks gross and half-dead, they are ready to go.

Dig

Put on your boots and go grab your garden fork or a shovel, and a pail.

Step on the fork, sticking it a foot deep or more into the ground and about 8 inches away from the base of the plant.

Loosen the soil around the entire plant - trying not to spear the potatoes lurking beneath…

…and then lift the plant out of the ground.

The potatoes will spring from the good earth loose or still clinging to the nodes of the plant.

So that’s how a potato grows.

You’ll be pulling up big ones and little ones. Eat up those little ones quick - potatoes taste best when they’re small and new.

The one that got away

You may have missed some, so roll up your sleeve, dig down into the dirt, and feel around for more.

If one does get away and you live in a warmish climate like us, they will sprout and pop up as a plant in the spring. Kind of nice.

Crop Yield: The Final Verdict

I don’t know about you, but I won’t be making my million on this crop.

Or even have many suppers.

Recall that I planted three kinds of potatoes: Red Pontiac, Yukon Gold, and Rose Finn Fingerling. We planted them in the Grow It Yourself garden and in another patch, too.

I must confess that the potato yields in the Grow It Yourself garden were quite sad indeed. The foliage on the plants was madness - the plants got to be 4 or 5 feet tall and I even had to stake them, which is a little embarrassing for a Canadian farmhand, not to mention just plain odd. I reckon there was an excess of nitrogen in the soil of this new garden bed, which was great for producing green, leafy foliage, but not great for potato formation.

Red-faced, I harvested only 5-10 potatoes from each of the plants.

In the other potato bed, however, Red Pontiac was the big winner with 20 potatoes per plant. Big, too. The others pulled their weight and we ended up with a good 50 lbs to put away for winter.

Storage

Potatoes live in the ground, which is cool and dark, and they like those same conditions above ground, too.

Keep them in a pail, box, or fancy potato bin in the coolest spot you have - the basement, the garage, or, if you’re really lucky, the root cellar.

Copyright of the lovely Three Potato Four.

Some kinds of potatoes keep better than others. We grew the Red Pontiacs specifically for winter storage, the Yukon Golds for summer eating and short-term storage, and the Fingerlings for supper. If you’re not sure how long or how well your potatoes will keep, it is worth looking it up or dropping us a line. Losing food you’ve grown is a crying shame.

In general, hard-skinned red potatoes and russet potatoes are the best keepers, yellow ones like Yukon Gold are pretty good but not long-term, and fingerlings are best eaten just out of the ground.

Stay tuned for more harvesting news and the ins and outs of fall and winter crops.

We’ve got room!

“Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn’t have the anxiety that we’d starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know?”

- James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader

James Earl Jones is right on.

A huge amount of security comes from knowing that potatoes are in the ground. We expanded the garden at Headquarters by a good 30 percent this year - part of it became the Grow It Yourself garden (with 3 rows and 3 kinds of potatoes) and the rest of it became…potatoes.

This is where things just get illogical. Potatoes take up quite a bit of room and are pretty cheap to buy so, to a hard-headed pencil pusher, it is probably not cost-effective or efficient to devote so much land to them.

But on Canada Day, when your arm is buried to the elbow and your fingers bump into that first potato of the year and you hold it up in triumph while your mom cheers from the patio and your dad pulls out more and more even though you just dug there and found nothing, and then you cook and eat them up with butter and just-snipped chives, well…

Oh Canada.

The potato schedule

If you planted your potatoes when we did - in late April - they are probably just starting to flower.

You should be able to dig down and find the first little potatoes in early July. (We’ll show you how this is done.) Through the summer you can rob just what you need for supper (take from different plants) and let the others grow to full size and harvest them in the fall.

In the meantime, you need to be watering and hilling - or piling up mulch (soil, straw, compost) to cover the leaves and stem of the plant as it grows.

You will need to hill 2 or 3 times through the season, and you ultimately want about a 12 inch mound. You can also think of it this way: mound it up so that 8 inches of the plant is showing at all times and the rest of it is covered.

The point of hilling is to create enough room for the potatoes to grow nice and big, and to keep them well covered - if they are exposed to sunlight they turn green and actually become toxic to eat.

Don’t freak out. The green is just chlorophyll and is not bad for you at all, but the colour indicates that a natural toxin in the potato - Solanine - has become concentrated in that part of the potato and this is what you don’t want to eat. If you ever see green on a potato, just cut it off. The rest of the potato is fine.

The same logic applies to storing potatoes - keep them in a cool, dark place rather than on a sunny, cheerful kitchen counter.

How to hill potatoes

Remember when I dug trenches to plant potatoes and I wanted to pack in so many that I didn’t have room to pile up the soil I dug out and I had to put it in pails? Good times.

Now we need to haul out our pails and return this dirt from whence it came.

Gently pile the soil next to the plant, right on top of the leaves.

Pile it up. Remember that you ultimately want a mound that is about 12 inches high.

If you actually have piles of soil on either side of your potato trench (normal), grab a hoe or use your own paws to scoop the soil over.

If you don’t have enough soil to do such a thing, you can also use compost (which has the added benefit of providing nutrients to the plant) or straw. Straw is nice because it keeps the potatoes nice and clean and they are easier to find. Mulching potatoes with straw is huge in Scandanavia.

How to water potatoes

To be honest, watering potatoes is one of those things that makes us a bit nervous. When they are hilled, it is hard to know whether they are getting enough water, too much, or what the heck is going on down there. Not enough water causes knobby potatoes worthy of entry in your local newspaper’s Weird Vegetable contest, and it also produces a smaller crop. Overwatering, on the other hand, can cause black or hollow centers in potatoes.

Shock horror!

It remains a bit of a mystery, but we’ve always ended up with good crops, so maybe it is not rocket science, after all.

This is what the potato people recommend:

During warmer summer weather, keep your potatoes well watered. We tend to give ours a good drink a couple of times a week, or 3 times if it’s really hot. (Note that we have pretty sandy, fast-draining soil - if your soil holds moisture longer you might be able to water less than this.)

We put the garden hose in the trench between the rows and let it run on a slowish trickle. How long depends on your soil and what you think is a trickle, but try 15 or 20 minutes per row. (You will probably have to move the hose to make sure all the plants in the row get watered.)

It is especially important to water when the potatoes are flowering and just after they have stopped because this is when the plant is actually producing potatoes. After this point the plant can tolerate a little more drought, so you can probably cut back to watering once or twice a week.

As always, watering in the cool morning is best.

Up next: Dealing with critters

Three more things to plant and the Grow It Yourself garden will officially be in the ground.

Tomatoes, potatoes, and beans each have their own special trick and you will need some extra supplies here: vegetable fertilizer and measuring cup, bone meal if you have it, bean inoculant, and little shallow dish or container of some sort.

TOMATOES

We are growing 4 tomatoes:

Glacier. An early maturing, red and tasty slicer.

Sungold. An orange ping-pong ball sized cherry. An all-time Urban Land Army favourite.

Green Moldovan. A late-season striped green slicer with sentimental value.

Black Prince. A prolific sauce tomato that is almost black. A new addition to our repertoire with a solid reputation. Recommended for new gardeners.

HOW TO PLANT A TOMATO

Dig a hole deeper than you would think. Tomatoes benefit from being planted quite deep, actually, and will send out a bunch of roots from the buried stem. If your tomatoes are a little on the short and stocky side, like ours, dig a hole deep enough so that the stem is buried by an inch or two. If your tomato has a long stem, dig a trench 4 or 5 inches deep and set the plant in it or dig a hole straight down about 6 inches. Don’t be afraid to bury the stem up to the top set of leaves.

Make sure the soil in the hole is nice and loose so that the tomato’s roots will be able to spread out.

Add 1/4 cup of vegetable fertilizer to the hole - about a handful.

If you have bone meal throw in a handful of that too. (We thought we had some. We did not. Harumph. Bone meal, high in calcium, helps to protect tomatoes from blossom end rot, an infuriating little disease that can sometimes, but not often, occur. We might get some later and work it into the soil so we can sleep at night.)

Now, mix the fertilizer and the bone meal together in the hole.

Holding the tomato so that it is straight and sturdy, backfill the hole with soil, press down firmly, and create your little moat about 1 foot around the base of the plant.

Put the tag in. You’ll forget which tomato is which - we promise you.

POTATOES

Now, potatoes are a bit of a special case.

First, you need to cut the potatoes a day or so before you plant them. Cut them in half, making sure there are at least one or two eyes on each piece. It is from the eyes that the sprout, and then the plant, will spring. Leaving them overnight heals or toughens up the cut side.

Second, potato plants are covered up with soil as they grow - this is known as “hilling”. You will be mounding up soil in hills throughout the season so that only about 8 inches of the plant is visible at all times.

Now, since this is a raised bed and the soil is already a foot above the ground, if you started mounding up soil even more then you would end up with tall, steep, and ridiculous hills of soil by the end of the year. And, you would run out of soil for mounding.

So here’s what you do if you have a raised bed: dig a trench 6 to 8 inches deep. If you have room, pile the soil next to the trench and then you can simply push this soil over for hilling when the plant starts to grow.

However, if you want as many trenches as you can pack in and don’t have room to accommodate these piles - and you just want to do things the hard way - you can do what we did. Put the soil in pails, store them in the garage, and use it for hilling when you need it. A little weird, yes, but square footage is precious in a city garden and a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

We planted 3 rows and 3 kinds of potatoes: fingerling (Rose Finn), yellow (Yukon Gold), and red (Forget The Name).

Before you put a potato in the ground, make sure the soil in the trench is loose. We gave each trench a quick once over with the garden fork.

Push the potatoes an inch or two into the soil sprout side up, cut side down, 12 to 18 inches apart.

The rows (trenches) should also be 12 to 18 inches apart.

When they are all in place, cover them with a few inches of soil…

…and press down firmly.

BEANS

We are growing 2 kinds of beans: Scarlet Runner Beans called ‘Golden Sunshine’ and pole beans called ‘Bingo’.

Trust us on this one: inoculating your beans is worth it.

What’s inoculant? Inoculant looks like silty brown soil and contains Rhizobium bacteria, which are necessary for converting nitrogen into a form that beans (legumes) can use.

The benefits? Improved soil fertility, stronger root systems, and way more beans, people. Way more beans.

Inoculant comes in a little package, something like this (no brand endorsement here, just what we happened to get):

How to inoculate your beans:

Get a shallow bowl and dump your beans in it. Add a very small splash of water, just enough to wet them.

Shake the inoculant over the beans so that they are covered in the stuff.

Give it all a shake to completely coat the beans.

Plant in a straight row in front of a trellis/pole/suitable bean structure an inch deep and 1 or 2 inches apart. Cover.

THE GARDEN IS IN!

Up next: Watering it in