planting potatoes

It's time to plant some more potatoes so we'll have delicious little new potatoes for end of June and July.

I found this heart potato while I was sorting through my box of French Fingerling seed.  A good omen for April Fool's Day!

These 50lb. boxes are full of Sieglinde and Blue Russian seed potatoes.  I'm unloading them from my truck here after I picked them up in Vancouver this week and  I'm so happy to get to start planting them.  I also have boxes of Chieftain, Yukon Gold, All Red, French Fingerling and Bananas....great selection this year!

These seed potatoes are a nice smallish size and so I've planted 5 in a pot on top of about 4 inches of potting soil, then covered with 1 to 2 inches of the soil....when green shoots emerge, I'll add more soil and straw, covering the shoots.  The greenery will grow up out of the soil and straw and I'll cover it again and it will keep growing up and out and I'll keep covering it 'til the pot's full.  This kind of mimics the hilling of potatoes that gardeners and growers do when growing them in garden beds and fields. My Dad recently told me that where he was born in the "old country" (northern Yugoslavia, sometimes Hungary at the time) there was a saying that went something like this: "Don't plant the potatoes so deep that they can't hear the church bell ring."  They were religious folk and maybe a little bit is lost in translation here but the message is still clear:  Don't plant potatoes too deeply...and hill them later, as they grow.

Lots of potato grow pots.  I'm planning to plant and harvest these twice this season and I'm hoping to produce hundreds of pounds of delicious and beautiful new potatoes.

more potatoes

Here's a simple idea for those potatoes and garlic scapes you're getting in the weekly basket or at Happy Tides.
Make some garlic scape pesto with the scapes. (see recipe in one of the previous posts) Cook the potatoes and toss them in a bowl with a little butter, chop up some of the dill from the basket and throw that in with the hot potatoes, let it steam a bit....add a couple dollops of pesto, stir and then crumble some feta cheese on top and lightly stir in....delicious! I love potatoes.

Above, 3 colours of potatoes prepared this way....and below three colours just harvested: Seiglinde, Russian Blue and Chieftain

the new potatoes are ready for harvesting!

I love growing potatoes in pots. I've already posted once about this and here I go again. I first tried it a few years ago and for the last couple of years, I've experimented with many different ideas, constantly learning how to make it work better. I think potatoes are such a gratifying crop to grow. This week, I began harvesting the first containers of the season.
They were planted late February/early March and the pots were kept in my new hoophouse (first time I've done this!) By May the hoophouse was getting way too hot for the potatoes so they were brought outside....(part of the plan)....by this time, the green growth was well established and the pots had been filled up to the top with soil and grass clippings.
The straw mulch I put around the black pots mid-May is insulating them from the hot sun, keeping the soil in the pots cool and moist.
This year I'm trying a couple varieties I haven't grown before to see which ones produce the highest yield in the pots and this one, "Chieftain" has amazed me! So many lovely nuggets in one little container!
A lot of people have asked me how I grow spuds in pots like this so here's what I do: (see also November 2009 posting, "potatoes in containers" for a slightly different version of what I do....it's always changing!) I use SeaSoil potting mix. I start with 3 seed potatoes in about 4-6 inches of soil. As the plants grow up, I add more soil and do this 'til the pot is about half full....by this time, I'm cutting grass and I have grass clippings to fill the pot up to the top (another new thing this year that seems to be working very well) You could use soil all the way up to the top if you rather (which I've also done).....keep the soil moist and cool (afternoon shade or straw mulch around the pots) and once the plants have flowered, there will be potatoes to harvest.
This year, I'm dumping the pot into a wheelbarrow to harvest and even tho' the general rule of thumb is to not re-use soil, I am reusing this soil because it's still beautiful potting soil. I mix a bit of complete organic fertilizer into it and use it to grow micro-greens and shoots in trays. It works fabulously. After the trays are harvested, I dump the soil into new growing beds that I'm building in my garden...you could just put it into your compost.
As these potato pots get harvested, they're replanted with more seed potatoes for another harvest in September.
I wanted to find out what the yield of one pot was but I couldn't fit them all on my scale....over 5 lbs! more like 6 pounds. I think I'll have to grow Cheiftain in larger pots next year.
These potatoes will all go to the weekly basket customers and Happy Tides.....but we get some too! "Seiglinde" and "Chieftain" for our dinner. With baby dill and garlic scape pesto. The taste of early summer. Jewels.

potatoes in containers

I had such a lovely day working outside today. No wind, no rain, a little sun, thank goodness. When it came time to think about dinner, I decided to harvest a pot of potatoes that I planted for winter new potatoes and thought I'd share my year-round new potato growing idea here.
It all started last year when I experimented with planting some Yukon Gold potatoes in a garden bed on labour day weekend. In January the garden was covered with a foot of snow (we had an unusually cold winter on the coast last year) but I was surprised and happy to see that when I moved the snow away and dug through the soil I found a lovely crop of new potatoes ready to be harvested! What a fabulous treat.
That summer I had also experimented with growing potatoes in containers and it worked beautifully. Many of the city-dwelling visitors to the garden went away interested in trying this on their balconies! Below is a 1/2 wine barrel growing Russian Blue potatoes.

This year, I decided I'd try to grow Seiglinde potatoes in containers to help with the production for my weekly veggie harvest basket deliveries and also for our own food throughout the year. Below is a photo of the containers all lined up.

I begin by putting about 2 inches of soil in the bottom of the container. I then set 4 small seed potatoes (or pieces of potatoes that have sprouts on them if they're large to start with) around the edge and 1 in the middle. I cover them with another 2 inches of soil and wait for the seed potato sprouts to grow about 4-6 inches tall. I then add more soil to almost cover the new green growth and let them grow again and then add the last layer of soil to fill the container and give them the maximum room to grow. I plant up the containers at different times throughout the season so I have a constant supply. There are always containers at different stages of growth and this year each container got planted 3 times from late February to early September.
New idea for next year: instead of filling the containers up to the top with soil, I'm going to cover the new growth with grass clippings, old hay, straw.
Here's me harvesting my container of new potatoes for dinner....see how the potato growth has turned all brown and is decaying....

The potting soil has been used for all 3 plantings. I'm now dumping the container fulls from this last winter crop into an area where I want to create a new garden bed. It'll help create some nice soil there.

Just over 4 lbs of beautiful unblemished potatoes this time. One of these pots will produce anywhere between 4 to 6 lbs. depending on how big I let the potatoes get before I harvest them.