The "Eyes" Have It

I normally try to plant Irish Potatoes around Valentine's Day.  Tricia picked up a planting guide from the feed store that states for our gardening zone that the 1st planting date in Spring is Feb 10 - Feb 29.  I jumped the gun by two days and planted them on Feb 8th.  I mean, it was 81 degrees!  Time to get going.  But potatoes require a little preparing before you put them in the ground. 

We picked up some Red LaSoda seed potatoes from our local feed store.  I got 15 pounds of seed potatoes this year and it cost me a hair over $10.  This variety does really well for our area.  The first hurdle you must jump over is deciding to plant these rather than splitting them in half and cooking them in butter and adding some fresh parsley and green onions on top.

Delayed gratification is the name of the game here.  Sometimes that gamble doesn't work out.  This year is going to be a bumper crop for spuds, though.  Last year was not.  I figured out my problem, though.  My soil test showed that I was low on sulfur.  Wouldn't you know that potatoes need sulfur, so I purchased a bag and broadcast the fast-acting sulfur and watered it in.

Then Benjamin began helping me cut up the seed potatoes.  The planting guide calls for cutting the potatoes into 'egg-sized' pieces, ensuring that there is at least one eye on each piece.  I'll generally cut the smaller potatoes in half and the larger ones in quarters.  We cut them up and laid them in trays for good air circulation.

Here is what it looked like when we were done.  I counted 163 pieces, but my count may be off by 10 or 20.  I set these aside for a couple of days.  We'll come back and check on them.

Here's what we're looking for.  We want the potatoes to 'scab' over where they were cut.  Can you see what I'm talking about?  We don't want the potato to be moist.  If you don't allow them time to cure and put them directly in the ground, there is a chance that they might just rot on you.  These are in good shape and ready to be planted.

I got my nifty planting knife that Russ bought me.  It has measurements scored along the blade that make it real helpful.  The planting guide suggests that you plant the potatoes 4-6 inches deep and 12 inches apart from the others.  Digging the hole, it was evident that the soil was in good shape, loose and not compacted.

I dropped the potato in the hole and covered with soil, adding some composted chicken litter to give the young potatoes a turbo boost.  You can see the eyes on the potato in the above photo.  Potatoes are generally slow to come up.  I'll be watching closely.  When they pop up, I'll put a layer of mulch around them to crowd out any weed pressure.  We'll report our yield when we harvest in mid-May.

Two Weeks Until the Spuds Go in the Ground

Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and the Lord blessed him.  Genesis 26:12

There are many verses in Scripture, particularly in the Gospels about the Parable of the Sower, in which the Lord talks about sowing and the multiplication of the seed, resulting in harvests of a hundredfold.  That's a great yield!  This year, we are going to track our harvest in our potato crop.  I've always enjoyed growing potatoes.  I can remember Irish Potatoes was the first thing my grandpa taught me to plant when I was a young boy.  Those are good memories about gardening that I still think about forty-something years later as I put in a garden each year.

I asked my wife to check out our local feed store for Seed Potatoes.  We generally plant the LaSoda variety.  The LaSoda is a red potato.  This variety was developed in 1948 by Louisiana State University Ag Experiment Station.  It is suited for our soils, climate and growing conditions.

Finally, Tricia texted me at work to let me know that seed potatoes were in.  You can see that we purchased 6 pounds of potatoes.  They were priced at $0.50 per pound or $3.00.  We have a whopping 10% sales tax in our parish, so after rendering to Ceasar what is Ceasar's, Tricia exited the feed store.  

I examined each potato for quality and all appeared to be good.  You can see right above my thumb in the photo below is one of the eyes of the potato.  My science teacher in high school, Stuart Buck, used to jokingly tell us that we should plant our potatoes wrapped in a newspaper so they'd have something to read while in the ground.  However, most newspapers today aren't worth wrapping fish in or lining a birdcage with , but that's neither here nor there and I digress.

Now you can plant the entire potato, OR you can cut the potato in pieces, ensuring that you have at least one eye in every potato chunk.  That's what I always do.  Each eye grows a nice potato plant.  I use a sharp knife to cut the potatoes up and then I turn them so that the cut side faces upward.  Then I place the potatoes inside in the warmest place I can find.  This will allow the cut part of the potato to 'scab' over.  I am told that if you immediately plant them without allowing them to scab, then the potatoes would rot in the ground.

I generally try to plant the spuds on or as close as possible to February 14th - Valentine's Day (since we love potatoes).  We'll see if the weather is cooperative.  They will mature in 110 to 120 days.  We know that we will put 6 pounds of potatoes in the ground.  A hundred-fold yield seems like a tall order!  We will track our harvest, though, and weigh it and report back our yield in early summer.

Early Potatoes

Week before last (January 13th) I pulled out the smallest of the potatoes that we didn't eat from our spring crop that was harvested back in May 2017.  Tricia kept them in a dark place for a long time and then we moved them into a small fridge that we have so that they would last until potato planting time.  It is hard to imagine that they are still around!  The potatoes have incredible shoots growing out of them.  They are just itching to grow, so I granted their wish.  Normally we plant LaSoda variety of red potatoes, but back in the spring, the feed store was out of LaSoda and all they had was Pontiac potatoes.  They grew fine and yielded well.  I still thing the LaSoda is a better variety.

Seed Potatoes saved from the 2017 potato crop

I worked up several rows with a shovel and a hoe.  It was a beautiful afternoon and it felt good to do some manual labor.  As always I love the smell of opening up soil.  With some baling twine, stakes and a measuring tape, I marked out the 16 foot rows with 24 inch row width and an 18 inch wide walk space between rows.  Then I went to the hen house and harvested some composted chicken manure.  I dug a four inch trench down the middle of the row and sprinkled the chicken litter in the trench and then covered it.

I dug holes on either side of the trench with a big knife.  The holes were 4 inches deep.  As the potatoes grow, the roots will get their fertilizer in time to produce nice new potatoes for us.

I make sure to position the potato so that the shoot is growing upward and then I begin to cover the potato up with dirt.

I usually try to plant potatoes around Valentine's day, so these are a month early.  We'll see how they do, especially since they went through all that cold weather last week when we got into the upper-teens.  I do have a back-up plan.  I'll check the feed store to see if they have LaSoda seed potatoes.  If they do, I'll buy a few pounds of those and plant them in the garden around Valentine's Day as "insurance" in the event these saved seed potatoes don't pan out.

Digging up Potatoes – 2016

Back on February 13^th we planted potatoes in our garden.  We like to plant both the Lasoda Red as well as Yukon Gold varieties.  We purchase the seed potatoes at our local feed store, but we also plant some of our own potatoes that we’ve saved over the course of the year in our potato bin in which the eyes have sprouted long shoots and the potatoes themselves are shriveled.  They’re not good for eating, of course, but they’ll grow more potatoes.  

I’ll cut up the seed potatoes into chunks, each containing a sprouted eye and allow them to ‘scab over’ for a couple of days.  I counted 168 individual seed potatoes. Then I simply put them in the ground.  This year we achieved 100% germination on the potatoes.  I mulched them with live oak leaves to discourage weed competition and top dressed with some chicken litter.  The potatoes flourished.  I mean they really put on a lot of vegetative growth, but the important growth is going on underneath the soil.

My garden planner told me to be checking for maturity in about 90 days.  Unfortunately, we experienced a good bit of rain in late April/early May and the potatoes that I planted on the lower side of the garden turned yellow and sickly.  To keep those potatoes from rotting in the muddy ground, we dug those up about a week ago.  A few were rotten and when we picked them, they squished in our hands, and were nasty smelling.  Most were okay, though.

Yesterday, I got my digging fork out and assembled my potato digging crew to dig up the remainder of the potatoes that were planted on the high sided of the garden.  We always like digging potatoes.  It’s like digging for buried treasure.  We started on one end of the row and I would turn over the soil and Russ, Benjamin and Tricia would unearth the potatoes and throw them in a big blue tub.

Tater diggers

The soil was rich and dark-colored, just teeming with earthworms.  We did run into some fire ants that had invaded the garden.  We raced to dig them and pick them from the dirt before they could bite us, but we weren’t very successful.  Potatoes of all different sizes were unearthed. 

Unearthing buried treasure!

We kept filling the bucket as we worked our way up and down all the rows.

Filling the Bucket

The red potatoes were by far the better producers in terms of quantity, while the Yukon Gold potatoes, while they didn’t produce as many, they produced potatoes of nicer size.

A nice Yukon Gold 'baker'

When all was said and done, we straightened up our aching backs and carried the tubs of potatoes back to the house where we’ll put the potatoes into milk crates and store them in the dark pantry. 

Potato Harvest Results - Spring 2016

We’ve learned through experience not to wash them and to keep them in a dark place and as cool as possible.  By following that practice, we’ve been able to almost make our potato inventory last year round.  I’ll need to plant the Fall potato crop a little earlier this year as the last ones were affected by the freeze.

I weighed the full potato harvest, minus a few that we ate fresh out of the ground cooked with some green beans, and our Spring Potato crop yield totaled 144 pounds.  We planted 10 pounds of red potatoes and 5 pounds of Yukon gold potatoes.  So a total of 15 pounds of seed potatoes yielded about 150 pounds of potatoes.  Looking at it another way, each pound of seed potatoes, on average, produces 10 pounds of potatoes to eat.  As I mentioned earlier, we planted 168 "pieces" of seed potatoes that yielded 144 pounds of potatoes to eat, so that tells us that that each 'seed' or piece of potato planted will yield, on average 0.85 pounds of potatoes to eat.  

That was great information to learn and we’ll certainly enjoy eating the potatoes that we dug, but that doesn’t compare to the memories and fun we had digging them up!

Planting Potatoes 2016

In our last post we talked about preparing our seed potatoes for planting by cutting them so that each chunk had an eye.  We allowed the cut potatoes to sit for a couple of days and 'scab' over so as not to rot once placed in the ground.  After only two days the potatoes' cut ends had healed over.  Right on schedule!

Saturday morning arrived and once the morning chores were done, it was time to get some potatoes in the ground.  I usually shoot for Valentine's Day as the planting day for potatoes.  This year I was a day early.  I decided to plant the potatoes in the area of the garden that was planted with squash and beans.  In 2012 I planted this plot with potatoes and we had our best yield ever.  Let's see if we can repeat.

The Potato Patch

I used a tape measure to mark off 24 inch rows and tied baling twine to stakes pulled tight to mark my rows.  Amy, the Jersey cow, was supervising my measurements and also requesting that I toss weeds over the fence.  I obliged.

Pulling up rows

With some good old-fashioned work with a shovel and a hoe, I pulled up five additional rows between the Onion row on the north and the brussels sprouts row on the south side.  I knew from the other day that I have 168 pieces of seed potatoes to plant, so we'll see if this is enough room or if I'll have to work up more soil.

Five rows ready to plant

Now potatoes should be planted 12 inches apart, so I made a marking stick using an old piece of bamboo cane that I've had in the corner of the garage.  I marked off 12 inch increments on the bamboo with a permanent marker.  Back when Russ was younger, I was the den leader of his group of Webelos Scouts.  In one of our activities we made walking sticks with bamboo. The bamboo came from a stand of bamboo cane at the farm in Oberlin that my grandfather had planted as a windbreak for the cattle.  As kids we'd run through the "bamboo jungle" pretending it was Viet Nam.  

In it's previous life as a walking stick, the bamboo had a leather string on the top with feathers on it. But that's not all.  As I was on my way to the scout meeting, I happened across a freshly hit raccoon on the road.  I pulled over and cut the tail off the poor old coon and tied it to the walking stick.  As you know, everyone needs a walking stick with a coon's tail on it, right?  From walking stick to measuring stick, that old piece of bamboo has more lives than a cat.

Marking, digging, planting

In addition to being planted 12 inches apart, potatoes should be planted 4 inches deep, according to LSU AgCenter.  I'm going to do something a little different.  I dug a 4 inch deep hole and then dropped a tablespoon of organic fertilizer and then covered it with a couple of inches of dirt.  Then I placed the potatoes in the hole.

Yukon Gold potatoes in the ground

Potato planting is back breaking work.  I got all the Yukon Gold planted and started on the LaSoda potatoes, finally covering with soil.  The eyes were all sprouted nicely and with a rain coming Monday and temperatures expected to be in the 70's all week, I think these spuds are going to really take off.

LaSoda Red Potato with a healthy eye

Finally I was finished!

2016 Potato Crop (or most of it anyway)

Or was I?  To my chagrin, I realized that I had 43 seed potatoes left.  So I pulled up another row and a half on the other side of the beets to finish up the job.  At long last, I was done.  As they grow I'll pull up soil around the plants and then mulch heavily with hay to crowd out any weed pressure.  In 90-120 days we'll be digging potatoes - another back breaking job, but a rewarding one.  Nothing like new potatoes cooked along with some fresh picked green beans.  This weekend I'll try to work up some ground to get some beans and corn planted.  Happy Growing, Ya'll!

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!