Getting Ready to Plant Potatoes

I asked Tricia to pick up some seed potatoes at the Feed Store the next time that she went to pick up dairy ration, laying pellets, and alfalfa.  This time every year our local feed store stocks up on seed potatoes that everyone in the area will be planting. Tricia picked up two boxes that consisted of ten (10) pounds of Lasoda Red Potatoes and five (5) pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes.

Some of the potatoes were large and some were small.  I just left them out on my workbench in the garage for a couple of weeks.  My goal is to always have them planted sometime around Valentine's Day.  It's easy to remember.  In our growing zone the planting range is from January 20th - February 28th.

Seed Potatoes

After sitting in the garage in 70 degree temperatures, the potatoes' eyes started to grow.  You can see the eyes sprouting on the Yukon Gold potatoes:

Yukon Gold eyes

And the Lasoda Red potatoes:

Ready to start growing

Now for smaller potatoes, you can certainly plant them whole.  If the potatoes are bigger than the size of a golf ball, I like to cut them so that each section has an eye. Sometimes, I can get up to four pieces off of a potato, but most of the time I'll get three.  Each one of these will produce its own plant.

This potato will yield three separate plants and hopefully many potatoes

Once I was finished cutting them, I laid them on trays.  The ten pounds of Lasoda Red Potatoes yielded 128 separate pieces and the five pounds of Yukon Gold yielded 40 separate pieces.  If my math is right, that will give us 168 potato plants if they all grow!  I will let these sit in the trays for 3 days until the cut edges have scabbed over.  Then they'll be ready to put in the ground - hopefully this weekend.

Trays of cut potatoes

Oh, one more thing.  We also saved some seed potatoes from our own crop.  You can see them all sprouted below.  They aren't very pretty, but they'll produce good potatoes.

Our own seed potatoes

I can't wait to get these all in the ground!