Key Points
Use certified seed potatoes to avoid diseases and ensure healthy growth.
Keep growing potatoes covered with soil to prevent toxic green spots.
Potatoes are an affordable, low-maintenance, and nutritious option to grow in your garden.
Potatoes are great to have in your garden. They’re relatively budget-friendly and fairly low-maintenance, not to mention they’re pretty tasty and packed with tons of nutrients.
However, there are a few key things to know about growing the tubers yourself, especially if you’re a first-time gardener. Here, an expert gardener shares the mistakes to avoid making when planting potatoes for the first time.
Meet the Expert
Lindsey Chastain is an expert gardener and founder of homesteading website The Waddle and Cluck.
Don’t Plant Grocery Store Potatoes
Grocery store potatoes are often treated with anti-sprouting chemicals, and planting these can cause the tubers to rot before sprouting.
Grocery store potatoes are also not certified disease-free, and can carry diseases and pathogens that can infect your soil for several years.
It’s best to use certified seed potatoes purchased from a garden center, as these are often tested and disease-free.
Not Covering Potatoes as They Grow
Potatoes don’t always stay buried beneath the soil as they grow further downwards, so you need to keep cover potatoes as they grow, explains pro gardener Lindsey Chastain.
“Keep an eye on the potatoes as they grow and cover anything that peeks above the soil,” she says. “I started leaving some extra room in the top of my planter just for this purpose.”
Potatoes must grow in darkness in order to prevent them from producing toxic solanine, which develops from sun exposure. This will ensure that they’re safe to consume later.
Cutting Up Seed Potatoes Based on Size
Cutting is a popular method to stretch a smaller supply of seeds, but you still need at least two eyes on a potato piece for it to grow.
If you’re cutting up seed potatoes, your cutting choices need to be based on where the eyes are. Cutting them up based on size, shape, or symmetry can lead to rotting and disease.
Don’t Soak Your Soil in the Beginning
Overwatering potatoes too early will cause to tubers to become wet and soggy.
“The second time I tried planting potatoes, I drastically overwatered them thinking that the grocery store potatoes weren’t the issue, water was,” Chastain says; she ended up with soggy bits of potato and zero new growths.
When you plant potato pieces, they don’t have any roots yet, so the key is to water them with small, consistent amounts. Once you start to see green sprouts, then you can gradually increase your watering, Chastain says.
Don’t Worry About Yellow Leaves
If you’re getting closer to harvest season and start to notice yellowing leaves, don’t panic. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve under watered your potatoes, but rather that your tuber is done with it’s soil bake.
“The leaves will turn yellow and look like they are dying and slumping over. It’s fine,” says Chastain.
Don’t Pull Out Your Potatoes Prematurely
While yellow leaves mean that soil baking is done, the potatoes still need some time underground to harden up. If you pull them up too soon, their skin will be too soft and they’ll go back quickly.
Chastain recommends waiting two weeks after noticing yellowing leaves to pull them out of the ground.
Read the original article on The Spruce
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