Growing potatoes -- methods and musings

Many people grow grocery potatoes, but it does have risks.  The most common problem is viruses, which are very widespread in ware potatoes.  The most common of these is PVS, which often won't even have any symptoms, other than that your yield will slowly decline.  PVY is also common in grocery potatoes.  It usually will have symptoms, but it is hard to get ahead of it because aphids spread it rapidly.  You can also introduce blight from grocery potatoes, which is a real bummer if you don't already have it.  The real problem is that it is hard to get rid of these once you introduce them, because potatoes volunteer so readily.  So, it is worth thinking about.  It mostly comes down to how serious you are about growing potatoes.  If you are growing a lot and relying on the crop, it would probably be worth the expense to get certified tubers.  Otherwise, people have been growing virus-infected tubers for most of history and they got by, so you probably will too.

Agreed Jim. I’m going to leave that pile there anyway to breakdown. I may as well throw some potatoes in there and find out what happens!

Well I’m more relaxed now. Seventeen minutes of farm to table beauty with a relaxing soundtrack. I see she had no problems growing potatoes.

Hmm I like the use of the potato starch, I have 60lb of last year potatoes to turn into oven chips, that will make a fair bit of starch perhaps I should try to capture it rather than sending it to the septic.

For many years I experimented with "cool" potato growing methods: straw bales, vertical towers, grow bags, and complex mounding processes. All that effort generally left me with pathetic, or dead, plants and yielded me a small handful of potatoes.

Last year I gave up on complexity. I stuck a few chunks in the raised bed and left them alone - and I finally got a good harvest! Sure, there were a few with a spot of green - which is not ideal - but most of the potatoes developed deep enough under the surface and came out just fine. So here's what I'm doing this year:

1. Planting a wider variety, to see which work best.
2. Planting the potatoes a little deeper.
3. Mulching a little around them as they grow, but only enough to block out the sun, not so much as to be called "mounding"
4. Yanking any plants that aren't thriving, and disposing of them at the landfill, just in case the lack of vigor is caused by disease.

It is my goal to see discover what works for my no-till, raised bed garden, rather than just listening to the cool methods that most people try once and then abandon.

I have come up with 3 hypotheses which are guiding my new potato philosophy. These hypotheses may not stand up to scrutiny or experimentation, since I have only had *one* successful harvest, ever!

Hypothesis #1: Leaves are solar panels. If you bury the solar panels, there is less energy to make the tubers. While you may gain some potatoes growing off the stems, you may lose harvest weight because of the solar energy lost in the process.

Hypothesis #2: A plant can only commit a certain amount of energy to producing tubers. Leaving aside the solar collection issue, it is doubtful that a buried plant will produce more weight in potatoes, unless perhaps it is gaining significant nutrient from the mounded soil or mulch.

Hypothesis #3: The extra human energy, materials, and money spent creating complex potato systems is a total waste unless you need to grow potatoes on a balcony or rooftop and are doing it just for fun.

Potato experts, what do you think??? If you have real experience, I want to hear it! Please don't tell me "what you've heard" but, rather, only what you have personally experienced. :)

Here's a pic of one of my potato plants. While I was out there, I noticed a few three-striped potato beetles. I've removed the ones I found and am waiting to see whether they cause problems for my tomatoes or potatoes.



Thanks!
Karl

Instagram: @foodforestcardgame
Website: FoodForestCardGame.com

I grow potatoes on a very small commercial scale, with hand tools, we plant our potatoes deep and do not hill as such. They do get a bit of extra soil pulled up round them preferably once, sometimes twice depending on how bad the weeds are, but that soil will be less than an inch in total.
Big bakers will get 3-4 inches when they hit flowering as they tend to push up out of the ground and go green.  over the last 5 days we've dug 80lb of potatoes grown with no hilling at all (the weeds were nice to us) and we got 2 green potatoes out of all of that, hilling would not have been cost effective at all. These are of course first earlies (Solist) so the potatoes themselves are small.  hilling pushes the production back and since we need the earliers possible potatoes to get the premium price and get traffic to the stand we do everything possible to get them out as early as possible including having them in a greenhouse!
I also help on the family farm which grows around 15-20 acres of potatoes, these are set and harvested by machine, so they are not planted as deep and the machine makes a mound over the seed piece, the reason is simply because the harvesting machine doesn't want to have to dig a foot down to get the potatoes so the seed piece is set about 1inch under the ground surface and a mount put over it. Once or twice the hiller will be put over the potatoes during the growing season. The main reason is to remove weeds but a secondary one is to reform the hills. since they are raised the soil tends to slump and get washed off a bit risking exposing the potatoes. I have never measured but I would guess that the hills end up around 6 inches higher than they started by the end of the season.

In my experience constant hilling is counter productive, we have a short season and blight is a when not an if, so anything that delays the harvest like burying all the food creating leaves is a dumb idea.

Karl Treen wrote:
Hypothesis #1: Leaves are solar panels. If you bury the solar panels, there is less energy to make the tubers. While you may gain some potatoes growing off the stems, you may lose harvest weight because of the solar energy lost in the process.

Hypothesis #2: A plant can only commit a certain amount of energy to producing tubers. Leaving aside the solar collection issue, it is doubtful that a buried plant will produce more weight in potatoes, unless perhaps it is gaining significant nutrient from the mounded soil or mulch.

Hypothesis #3: The extra human energy, materials, and money spent creating complex potato systems is a total waste unless you need to grow potatoes on a balcony or rooftop and are doing it just for fun.

Those are all pretty strongly supported.  Figure there have been something like 10,000 years of potato cultivation in the Andes and no evidence that they developed extreme hilling or towers or other crazy schemes to get more yield.  Hill enough to keep the leaves in the sunlight and the tubers out of it.

Skandi Rogers wrote:In my experience constant hilling is counter productive, we have a short season and blight is a when not an if, so anything that delays the harvest like burying all the food creating leaves is a dumb idea.

William Whitson wrote:Those are all pretty strongly supported.  Figure there have been something like 10,000 years of potato cultivation in the Andes and no evidence that they developed extreme hilling or towers or other crazy schemes to get more yield.  Hill enough to keep the leaves in the sunlight and the tubers out of it.

Thanks to both of you for the helpful comments. Maybe the boring (but effective) way just doesn't get enough clicks to rise to the top of the search results. ;)

Karl- unfortunately, I agree with you. I have tried various methods over the years with mixed success. The best success has been adding better quality(purchased) soil, then mulching above, but that's expensive considering the price of potatoes.

I think it says something that this year, when I am worried about the food supply and it counts, I planted 4 10' rows or potatoes, in the ground, 6" deep, and intend to hill over them once the plants get 8" tall to keep the roots covered, and maybe hill once more during the summer, just to keep them from greening. I have never found any evidence that any more billing than that is useful.  I KNOW I will get production this way. I also planted a few leftovers in my mulched garden (2 15 'rows) - it will be interested to see the difference in yield.

about potato tower:
DO POTATO TOWERS WORK? (READ BEFORE YOU TRY!)
https://www.apieceofrainbow.com/potato-towers/

A question for you, Darron, or those with lots of potato experience. I am curious what has caused the splitting in this red potato?
I am in the coastal Pacific Northwest, just a bit south of where I think you are, Darron.

Thank you all.

Hope this one works

My long-term approach to growing potatoes is just to let them grow and harvest, leaving a few in the ground. Nevertheless, in the past that didn’t work out completely, as my beloved potato patch turned to mush over the winter, so to deal with that I decided to try breeding reliably winter-hardy potatoes. I started by some true potato seed I obtained from a person growing them in a similar climate to mine, also zone five. Some of them were random seeds; some were specifically from cold-hardy volunteers. Interestingly, although I got the children of cold-hardy volunteers into the ground late, it is one of the children from an unknown variety, a round yellowish kind, that seems most promising. One is that they (along with the cold-hardy child) were very vigorously growing, even in the first year; two; I tried to remove all the tubers I could from the ground, and despite that they came up, through a pile of weeds I had made—and three, more vigorously than any other of the volunteers. That means either they made more than one medium-sized tuber in their first year of existing (which would be crazy!) or they made these shoots from microtubers, which might be even crazier. Or, the more mundane explanation, it could be that I accidentally weeded out a tuber-grown variety I had left in the soil to test their hardiness. I hope it’s a magical prodigy potato, though; that seems a more satisfying story. Since the other potato was purple and that one was yellow, we shall see at harvest time... The cold-hardy child also sent up volunteers, too, even though I thought I had removed every substantial tuber. So it seems like this breeding project might help, but well-drained soil without many temperature swings during the winter (like the frost-pocket terrace that sprouted a few fingerling volunteers) seems rather more important.
Another interesting TPS variety has a beautiful skin, dark and speckled, like the night sky. This one didn’t seem to come back up from volunteers, but their place was taken over by an encroaching patch of daisies, so little can be expected from a potato in that case.

I’m trying hilling this year for the first time. I never really have had problems with green potatoes, though, but some have suffered from pests and diseases in the summer heat, and anyway, they seem to look greener and happier and less floppy when I do hill. I just pile soil up to the point where the bottom leaves have deteriorated.

Maieshe Ljin wrote:My long-term approach to growing potatoes is just to let them grow and harvest, leaving a few in the ground. Nevertheless, in the past that didn’t work out completely, as my beloved potato patch turned to mush over the winter,
...
I’m trying hilling this year for the first time. I never really have had problems with green potatoes,.

Personally, I suspect that if you want to grow and store volumes of potatoes as winter food, you may find it necessary to adjust your methods.

Growing potatoes is incredibly easy when you have the correct foundations of healthy soil and a covering. I actually made a video on my YouTube channel (Luke Kelsall) about this exact topic. I never water, fertilise, mound up any of my potatoes and have great success. I will be giving an update on them soon on my channel, but I can tell you they are super healthy and are already developing huge potatoes.

Luke, I couldn't agree more about the correct foundations for healthy soil.

I like to recommend a mulch of thick wood chips, along with leaf mould and mushrooms.

Here is Dr. Bryant Rehawk's Soil Series for folks who would like to know more:

https://permies.com/wiki/redhawk-soil

Hi Anne, yes, I have found wood chips to be the best covering in my food forest. Especially for growing potatoes as they eradicate the need for mounding up as the potatoes grow, along with a whole host of other benefits.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Maieshe Ljin wrote:My long-term approach to growing potatoes is just to let them grow and harvest, leaving a few in the ground. Nevertheless, in the past that didn’t work out completely, as my beloved potato patch turned to mush over the winter,
...
I’m trying hilling this year for the first time. I never really have had problems with green potatoes,.

Personally, I suspect that if you want to grow and store volumes of potatoes as winter food, you may find it necessary to adjust your methods.

Essentially, I’m trying to breed winter-hardy potatoes. It’s called the “STUN method” (sheer total utter neglect) and as far as I remember, it is not a highly controversial practice for plant breeding in permaculture. Do you have anything more specific to say?

I think I will try winter potatoes.  I have wanted to for a while, but I could never find seed potatoes in my area that time of year.  This year I will just buy some organic potatoes.

I had actually forgotten about this post, so I'm glad someone brought it back to life, I enjoyed rereading all the great comments.  I enjoyed growing those potatoes, but didn't get very many potatoes.

As far as potatoes go it's still something I struggle with.  Like Comfrey everyone says it's soooo easy, just do it.  But I don't count potatoes as an easy no fail crop. For me that would be zucchini and squash. Plant it, water it , harvest it every day and eat it every way you can imagine until your sick of it.  
I did plant potatoes this year. I harvest one already. The plant was looking terrible, so I dumped the pot. There were lots of baby potatoes, and they tasted great.  I still have two containers left one pot that plant looks on deaths door. The one in the grow bag actually looks great and is flowing, so who knows.  I did put some in the ground.  They were potato I bought to eat. They sprouted. I dug some holes through the potato in with some compost, and watered. They were are alive, I don't know why, all spring they have been ravaged by slugs.  So we will see if we get anything from them.
Mostly I try potatoes out of stubbornness.  It's almost on the way bother list. Like corn. It's so cheap to buy, if I want fresh I just buy it at the farmers market, it takes up so much room to get one or two ears per stalk then open it up to have a giant disgusting worm ear my precious corn. No thanks.  We will see. I managed to get comfrey to grow, maybe I can conquer potatoes.

Thanks everyone for posting, I have enjoyed your wisdom.

Kc Simmons wrote:

I've been mounding mine with a mix of wood chips and leaves, but I didn't go that high on them (maybe 4-5" on a 12" plant). I broke some of the lower leaves, on accident, when applying the mulch but, otherwise, just kind of lifted the leaves up and have them kind of resting on the mulch.

Love old threads like this coming to the surface like buried treasure! So cool that you are/were using leaves to mulch. I have a lot of those, so will try that!

Jen, so cool that you are trying winter potatoes now! Did you plant the other kind of potatoes this year? I just put mine in and used six cardboard boxes with mulch and soil. They are late but last year, I did the same thing, only at the end of July, and got some potatoes out of it.

(EDITED) Sorry, I see that you said you had tried it this year. It's interesting how different things grow so differently in different areas. For me, in Zone 3, potatoes are my "easy, grow-no-matter-what crop," whereas other things just seem impossible, no matter what you do. Radishes are my hardest thing to grow. I haven't got a crop yet.

Your right Shari.  I try when posting not to say things like this is a no fail plant, or it's so easy to grow.  I'm sure I mess up now and then, but I try because I don't want people to feel discouraged or inadequate.  I will often tell new gardeners (in my area), especially with kids to grow radish because here it will grow seed to eatable in about 30 days.  Mine are almost a weed at this point.  But like I said when I first started to grow comfrey I had a terrible time.  Here is this amazing plant so easy to grow and so invasive they had to make a hybrid that doesn't reseed and I can't get it to grow at all.  Its embarrassing how many root cuttings I managed to kill. It wasn't very long ago I discovered Comfrey is for zones 4-8 (though today when I checked it said 3-9. gotta love the internet) Depending on who you listen to it's not surprising I had a hard time.  The internet brings us all so close together it's easy to forget what works for me, may not work for a lot of others reading the post.  Sorry I've slid off topic here.  This was just an aha moment for me. I have to remember to always add, "for me" or "in my climate" so people and take the information for what its worth.  I try to say I'm N. California zone 9b these days.  Just to make it easier for people reading the post know if my results, or info will be helpful to them.  Sorry

We will see if I get any potatoes this year.  I think I will try to plant some in September, October and November.  Just to see if any of those work better then spring planting for me.  I have lots of ground space I can plant, but the gophers have made planting in the ground almost pointless.  I can't wait to dig up the ones I planted in the ground and see if they left me anything.  `