Complete Potato Growing Guide: Planting to Harvest

what's up Lazy Dog fam hope all yall are having an awesome day as the title of this video suggests I wanted to put together kind of a compilation to show you the whole process start to finish of our potato growout in the raised beds this year so we'll kind of jump through this footage showing dates along the way starting with how we prep the beds for planting cutting the potatoes before planting how we planted the potatoes what we did with the plants along the way and then what we harvested at the end so let's start out by going back to early February when we had some mustard greens growing in a couple of our raised beds we'll show you how we got rid of those mustard greens and prep those beds for potato planting and just as a side note here we've talked about the whole mustard green biofumigation process on a lot of previous videos if you can plan ahead well enough it's a great idea to grow mustard greens whether they're edible mustard greens or cover crop mustard greens gross some mustard greens where you plan on planting potatoes the following spring so plant your mustard greens in the fall or winter months and then do what I'm about to show you before you plant your potatoes all right so I got all I wanted to get there enough for a little small mess of muster greens not going to feed an army with that but it' be a nice little tasty treat the rest of these leaves we left out here we'll use for B fumigation purposes as we turn those into the soil just like we've done in the past in our in ground Garden before I start digging around here need to get my drip tape out so I'm going do that real quick I don't think I'm going to use drip tape on these ters I might just go ahead and disconnect the majority of what we have set up here just want to make sure I find all those Staples so now that we've got our drip tape removed we just want to start chopping and flipping this stuff I'm just going to dig down with my shovel just kind of turn this stuff over here pull out a few of those weeds as we go chop it up a little bit get it broken up we are going to need this to be you know somewhat soft and broken down we don't need it too chunky when we come in here to plant ters so going to get it mixed up pretty well here all right so just after a few minutes of chopping and flipping this is where we're at still looks a little crude but we're about to fix that so I've got three different things that we're going to add to this bed we've got a little C grow fertilizer there we've got some mushroom compost and then I've got some worm castings plus worms from our worm farm over there by the barn so I think I'll start off with the coue grow here not going to put a ton of it down just kind of a light sprinkle as we get some rain over the next couple weeks let this stuff start breaking down let this organic fertilizer start breaking down that way it can be available to our next round of plants then I'm going to put down my worm castings they're a little wet little chunky that'll be all right got a decent amount of worms in there too which is okay cuz we got plenty of worms hopefully the worms will help kind of break down some of this stuff over the next couple weeks got some nice castings here after having that worm form for year year and a half and then lastly one of our favorites the old black velvet mushroom compost this is one of the best things you can do for raised beds or containers in my opinion a $5 bag of this will do wonders for your soil I really like it for raised beds because it helps them retain moisture raised beds dry out faster they don't hold water as well as the inground Garden but the mushroom compost definitely helps and helps get some good biology going so oh these bags are heavy we might end up using this whole bag here we'll just see how much it takes to cover up all that vegetation all right all right all right I'm liking the way that's looking right there so now you can't even tell we had anything planted here this mushroom compost and other stuff will get more incorporated into the soil when we dig a trench or a Furrow to plant those potatoes but right now the mushroom compost is just kind of keeping that mustard from growing back so that's how we got got those beds ready to plant now let's fast forward to the middle of February when we cut our potatoes to get them ready to plant and just for a little background on this part of the process we usually order our seed potatoes from wood prairie farm in early January go ahead and get them here we put those bags of seed potatoes in a dark closet until we start to see Sprouts on them and then when we go to cut them up as I'll show you here in a minute we like to follow what we call the half an egg rule so ideally we want each piece of the sea potato to be about half the size of a large egg and we got that from Jim over at wood prairy farm he gave us that tip a couple years ago so we've got all our seed taters here we pre-sprouted these in a closet and they've just been hanging out under the barn and these tubs for the last few weeks these smaller quantities here are what's going to go in the raised beds so let me give you a few examples of how we would cut these or some that we may not cut at all so here we've got a rose gold seed Tater got five or six nice Sprouts on it and this is about the size of an egg so we pretty much want to cut this one in half but I want to try to get equal amount of Sprouts on each piece so in some cases I may cut it this way in some cases I may cut it this way for this one here looks like just cutting it right in half like that going to work pretty well so there we we go we got our two pieces but for this rose gold Tater here looks like most of the Sprouts are kind of on this top end here so instead of cutting this one like we cut that last one I'm going to cut this one across like this right here and that way we've got relatively equal number of Sprouts on each piece now for the Charlotte variety here some of these are about the size of an egg but some of them are kind of small so for that little nugget right there I'm not going to cut that at all we're just going to plant that one whole I could cut it but going by that kind of half an egg rule we're going to leave that one ho this one here I will cut and looking at the Sprouts there think we'll just cut it in half that way to give us two pieces and also hopefully now you can see just how much you get once you cut them up even with these one PB quantities here you can see we've got quite a few there once we cut them up we've got more than enough in these three tubs here to cover those two long skinny raised beds now a lot of the old-timers out there have their own little set of tricks that they swear by and so a lot of them will coat their ters once they cut them coat them with sulfur lime you hear all kind of different things people use to coat the cut surface of the seed taters there I don't coat mine with anything I've tried coating them with stuff in the past couldn't tell it really made a difference so I don't coat mine we'll just put them back under the barn for a few days we don't want to plant them like this right after cutting we do want to let this kind of wound here heal process we call subarz so we want to let that kind of scab over and toughen up a little bit before we put these in the ground that's why we cut them say 3 or 4 days before we want to plant so that's how we cut and prepped our seed potatoes for planting now let's fast forward just a few days and show you how we actually planted them in those beds and I want you to especially take note here of just how thick we were able to plant them in those beds and so as I've told you in previous videos ideal Tater planting time is going to be a few weeks before your average last frost date in late winter early spring doesn't have to be exactly two weeks before your average last frost state but that's a good time frame to aim for another thing you want to consider is how much rain is in the forecast you don't want to plant ters if you're about to get a bunch of rain cuz can cause them to rot in the ground and looking at our forecast for the next 10 days or so like I said today is Sunday looks like we might get a little bit of rain this Friday but we're pretty much Clear of precipitation in the forecast for a good eight or 10 days which means it's a perfect time for us to be planting all right so in the rais beds here the way we did this last year is we made some trenches in here and then as potatoes sprouted and grew we back filled the trenches and then healed them that worked really really well it's going to be hard to do that in this long skinny bed and because it's so full here I can make get maybe get one trench down the middle but I want to plant more ters in here than that so we're going to do it a little differently we're going to just use this little dibler we're going to make us a hole and just kind of poke our seed ters down in that hole and put as many as we can in this bed I noticed some of those worms in here earlier that we put back when we were flipping these beds they seem they seem to have done a really good job of chewing up that vegetation that we buried so we got some beautiful beautiful soil here there's one of those worms right there all right so we're going to try to plant the Charlotte and rose gold in this bed so just start by making some dibles here a little bit put one in this hole just like that we going plant them in here pretty thick we noticed last year in our other race beds that you know planting them thick didn't really hurt yield here so I TR as we can yeah stick them down this hole right here okay put put the last one right there I need it so deep down there you can't even see it Dad all right so we got rose gold and Charlotte in that other bed for this bed here it's the same size we're going to do purple Viking down this side and then for the other side I've got some leftovers from those varieties we plant in the inground Garden so will just scatter those there have a little hodge podge on that side and a single variety on this side all right Titus you ready to go yeah all right put it in the hole there you go all right okay this one big there a big one get it in there all right good job all right we're good on that row with the purple Vikings let's go get some of those other leftover ones we got all right you can see here we had a decent amount of ters left over from our inground planting usually 5 lb is just the right amount for a 30ft row but had a lot more left over this year I don't know if my seed taters were bigger or maybe I was a little more frugal with cutting them but got more leftovers than we usually have I all right though we're about to find a home for most of them right here oh look how big that one is that's a big old piece Ain it okay I can't even put it in there that's all right all right we are done I know a little bit taking one little bit you want to take one home with you uhhuh one of those two okay all right so we got both raised beds planted now we put about one and 1 half times more seed taters in this bed than we did that bed over there so that'll be interesting to kind of keep an eye on see if we end up with some smaller ters in this bed where we packed them in there a little tighter and so now we just play the waiting game we won't give these any water until we start seeing leaves popping out of the soil we want to keep the soil nice and dry so these seed ters don't rot so should take about a couple weeks and we should start seeing some leaves popping out of the soil and if you've never grown ters before just kind of give you an idea what will happen here so we've got our seed Tater piece down in the soil got this little Sprout here where the leaves will eventually form on top of the soil but it will start to form Roots right here pretty soon right on top of this seed Tater piece it will look like a little spider so those roots will form right around where that Sprout is and they'll connect out into the soil there and anchor down and the Sprout will grow up and that's where our leaves will come from we'll get roots and leaves from anywhere we have a sprout on any particular seed Tater piece so after waiting patiently a couple weeks we started to see some little green leaves emerging from the soil in those raised beds there now let's fast forward to around the middle of March with the potatoes have been in the ground about a month and they're really starting to take off and then over here in the raised bed plot these are looking even better than those inground potatoes are I can't remember exactly which varieties we have planted in each of these long skinny beds I want to say this bed here has purple Viking and then some leftover from those inground varieties and I think this bed here has Charlotte and rose gold in it so the fast growth on these tells me that these plants really like what we got cooking as far as our soil mix in these raised beds before we planted these potatoes about a couple weeks before we planted them we added some mushroom compost some worms and worm castings from our worm farm and some of that c grow fertilizer now over here in these raised beds we're going to have to do things a little bit differently because these ters are planted so thick and they're growing so fast and my soil and my race beds is almost all the way to the top already so probably later this afternoon or tomorrow what I'll do is I will sprinkle some cou grow amongst these plants here as best I can probably get me a couple bags of mushroom compost and just try to kind of work it around those plants give them a little bit of extra soil to work with we're not going to be able to heal these real tall but I am going to try to add some soil there and so once those plants started growing and they grew really really fast now let's jump to the end of March where they had grown significantly in just a couple weeks and show you how we added some compost to those beds to kind of heal or Mound the soil around those plants so it's hard to believe by looking at these plants here that these have only been in the ground a month and a half these things are growing so fast I don't know if this is Charlotte or rose gold that's blooming here but one of these varieties is blooming we planted both Charlotte and rose gold in this bed can't remember which variety went on which side of the bed these plants are just going crazy in here we almost need a trellis for them because I know pretty soon they're going to get so tall they're going to start falling over now because these raised beds are almost all the way filled with soil we're not going to be able to heal these like we did our inground potatoes but we're going to try to add some compost in there try to sprinkle some between those plants give them a little more support considering how fast they're growing so I've got a few bags of mushroom compost that I'm going to bust open in my wheelbarrow here now this is the same black cow brand that you'll find in the yellow bags at your big box store for some reason this I get from a local greenhouse supply store comes in white bags but it's the same stuff that you'll also see in yellow bag now because I've got such a jungle of Tater plants here I can't just shovel this stuff into the bed I'm going to have to be a little more delicate with it so I'm going to take my coffee can here and I'm just going to try to sprinkle it between these plants here get as much in there as I can all right so not a super duper healing by any means but this should help stabilize these plants especially as fast as they're growing I know inevitably they will spill over the side of this bed we're just prolonging the inevitable by adding some compost there and in case you're wondering why we didn't add any cou grow before we did that like we did with our inground ters I had already added some about a week ago I sprinkled some on both of those beds and as you can see by the color of the plants that soil's pretty fertile I think they're good for right now so our plants were looking pretty good going into that last month of growth now let's fast forward to the end of April where we started having a few little disease spots popping up on our potato plants we'll tell you whether we were or weren't worried about those disease spots and give you a few really helpful potato growing tips including the importance of watering well in that last month and these two raised beds full of potatoes are following suit as well this one here looks really really good this one over here has had a few plants that started wilting on me there not sure what happened with those but most of them look pretty good and speaking of container ters or raised bed ters got a message the other day from someone showing me a picture of their ters and containers it was their first time growing them and they wanted to know if it was normal for them to get two and a half foot tall or taller and like I told them if you got some good soil there that's not unusual at all those in the raised beds behind me there about 2 and 1/2 3T tall I'm surprised they haven't fallen over the side of the bed yet now another message we've been getting a lot lately is I've got some spots on my potato leaves or some discoloration should I spray them or should I just leave them and I think that decision is going to depend a lot upon how far you are into the game if you're in the middle or late part of the third quarter going into the fourth quarter like we are probably wouldn't worry about it a whole lot but if you're in the first quarter you're in the beginning of your potato growout and you're already starting to see stuff like that probably want to use a fungicide try to slow that down a little bit so it doesn't your plants too much but in our case here with less than a month to go I'm not going to worry about potato plant diseases a whole lot if we get some we get some so be it the Heat's going to start working on these plants pretty hard in the next few weeks and potato plants naturally will have that die back down here as they reach their maturity date so they're going to get killed off one way or the other I don't mind a little plant disease if I see some this late in the game it's not going to make me rush to go grab a sprayer we'll just let what will happen happen and we are actually pretty fortunate down here as far as potato pest issues go I know in other places they deal with potato beetles and all kind of different potato pest but down here we really don't have a lot of issues on our potatoes we have issues on other night shades like peppers and tomatoes but not really on potatoes don't really ever see a lot of bugs on them don't see a ton of disease maybe a few spots here and there I haven't sprayed any of these potatoes one time we've just been letting them go and seems like if we've got nice good organic matter in the soil nice healthy soil they can kind of push through any little obstacle they may run into along that three window so besides planting at the right time getting these things in before it gets too hot the three most important things for getting a really good potato Harvest are fertility well- drained soils and frequent watering so we'll start out with fertility some people may have wonderfully fertile soils but most of us are going to have to add some fertilizer we've already sidess these twice with coup grow each time we healed them we side dressed them with some cou grow potatoes aren't as hungry as something like corn but you do got to feed them and then the last two keys kind of go hand in hand the well- drained soil and the frequent watering because you can't do the frequent watering unless you've got well- drained soil so in talking to Jim over at wood Prairie in the last few years I really understood the importance of frequent watering in this home stretch it really helps get those potatoes to size up and give you a nice nice yield now if you've got soil that doesn't drain very well that's going to be hard to do because frequent watering is going to easily oversaturate the soil and as those potatoes mature they could start to rot because the soil is too wet thankfully in this plot we've added tons of compost over the years it drains really really well we got 6 Ines of rain a week or two ago and just about 2 days later I was out here watering these again so the go here in the home stretch Is frequent watering we don't want to oversaturate the soils we just want to give them a splash keep those plants happy help those potatoes continue to enlarge to maximal size and a lot of times potato plants won't tell you when they're thirsty it's got to get pretty dry out here before these plants start looking pitiful so the plants aren't necessarily going to tell you that they need water but just know in that last month they do and so what I've been doing lately with these raised bed potatoes because I don't have these on drip been coming out here every afternoon and giving these a little splash with the hand nozzle not a ton of water just standing over each bed for a minute or two with some soft water just to keep them nice and happy and lastly let me take you to the middle of May which wasn't too long ago as I'm standing here now and show you what we actually harvested from those two long skinny raised beds but anyways getting back on track with our garden work today we've got two raised beds of ters here that need digging this one probably more than that one but we're going to go ahead and get both of them today now before we start digging these I figured it'd be a good time to talk about how we know when potatoes are ready to harvest so number one you've got your listed maturity date whatever it is for the variety that you planted some potato varieties are going to mature around 90 days some might take 110 15 15 days some varieties are going to be ready to harvest a lot sooner than others so keep track of when you planted assuming you had Sprouts when you put your seed Tater pieces in the ground keep track of when you planted when you get close to that listed maturity date should be about right and then the second really easy way we know they're ready to harvest is that plant dieback that you saw earlier in those raised beds those plants that were once nice and Lush and green are now all yellow kind of dead look so for us down here in the Deep South once we start getting temperatures in the high 80s low 90s potato plants don't like that at all they'll start dying back some of this die back we see here may be a little bit disease related a lot of it's heat related and the fact that we're coming up on that listed maturity date now one more thing before we start digging these I wasn't able to heal these in the rais beds near as much as I would have liked because when we planted these the soil was kind of already topped off to the top of the beds now we did plant them pretty deep down in there but they'll kind of push up over time and as you can see here we've got a few potatoes that are exposed to the Sun and that's why I always say whether you believe or not that it actually improves production it's a good idea to add soil to your potato plants as they grow or heal them as we like to say if for no other reason than protect them from being exposed to the Sun and turning green on you so let's start digging this first bed here which has two different varieties planted we planted a variety called rose gold and a variety called Charlotte can't remember where each variety is but we'll find out here shortly we're just going to start pulling up these plants kind of scratching down there probably pretty deep and finding our ters I know Brooklyn's also been scratching around in here a little bit too those there aren't huge there's a nice one there's a big one this looks like the rose gold variety here to me decent little production there so far now I also have noticed in addition to these lovely ters I've got decent amount of ants in here as well so I'm going to have to move fast or else these things are going to tear my hands up ain't as deep down there as I thought they may be we're getting a decent amount of them it's perfect size right there now that plant right there looks like it might have underperformed a little bit got a bunch of smaller ones we can find some better ones there we go put all its energy into that one right there and so as I've told you before anything between 8 to 10 times multiple is a pretty dang good Tater Harvest you're not going to get that every single year that's kind of a good gold to strive for in these raised beds we planted one pound of every variety so if we Harvest 8 to 10 pounds of each variety we would have done pretty good anything over 10 lbs that's just great and so this is what we got from planting one PB each of the rose gold and the Charlotte variety now I knew the rose gold was going to be a really good producer we grew it last year had a 37 times multiple last year knew that probably wasn't going to happen again but I'd say we got close to 10 lbs in that bucket there nice size on those really really solid producer now a Charlotte variety here I had never grown before don't know how many pounds we got there probably around I don't know six or seven does it make huge potatoes but man those are pretty and we'll cut some of these open in a minute just to show you what they look like but this is a good example that not all Tater varieties are created equal some varieties make smaller ters like that right there they're going to be really really tasty some varieties are going to make bigger ters those are a lot bigger we got a lot more weight from that variety but they're not near as pretty as this variety so it's fun to plant a bunch of different ones and kind of compare them now let's move over to this bed where we've got a variety called Purple Viking on this side and then on this side we just planted a hodge podge of leftovers that we had from our inground plot so the purple Viking is what I'm really going to be looking at here seeing how that variety produced since we've never grown this before now these aren't dyed back near as much as that other bed but they're dyed back enough that we can Harvest them and I should also mention normally you wouldn't want to dig potatoes after you've just gotten 4 in of rain the day before I would not dare dig any inground taters today but in these raised beds with very well drained in soil we can get away with it go ahead and knock these out so let's see what we get with our purple Vikings here and then we'll work on our hodge podge of varieties over there and those are pretty rather there nice dark purple color on those man way down there look at there that's a pretty pretty looking Tater have to get way down deep in there for these but shoot we got three or four nice ones off just one plant there there's some more right there like this is going to be a winner like what I'm seeing so far with these just going to have to work for them a little bit Mercy look at the size on that I don't remember if purple vikum was early maturing or not but based on the size of these I would say it probably is finded a bunch of those little worms in there remember before we planted these when we got these beds ready we added some worms and worm castings looks like those worms have definitely multiplied all right so this is what we got total from the second bed pretty decent amount of those purple Vikings there especially considering we only planted one lb now those are really pretty hard to tell right now because they got so much dirt on them once they dry off a little bit we can shake that dirt off you can see the real pretty exterior to those nice size on those really big ters and then right here we've got a mix of hookberry gold and Baltic rose that we had left over from my inground Rose most of the purple ones are at the bottom you see mostly Baltic Rose at top there but you know over half a five gallon bucket full from just a pound of those in this bit now if you have anybody try to tell you that potatoes ain't worth growing in the backyard garden because seed ters are too expensive you tell them one they're crazy and two they don't know how to grow ters because with not much effort we were able to turn four lbs of seed ters into all this right here and just those two little skinny raised beds probably at least 40 to 50 lbs of ters right there and if you're having trouble getting get into that 8 to 10 times multiple on your tater Harvest remember as I've told you on previous videos got to just keep it simple when it comes to Growing ters you need some really good well draining soil you need to water them well in that last month of growth there and you got to feed these things don't believe that online baloney if you just put down a bunch of wood chips you're going to get this unicorn soil that you don't have to fertilize you got to feed these things at least two times if not three times and you will be rewarded you'll get that 8 to 10 times multiple or maybe even more so I hope you enjoyed that compilation of footage there showing start to finish the potato process if you've never grown potatoes before in your backyard garden hopefully that will inspire you to do so and if you've grown potatoes before but are struggling getting a decent Harvest hopefully those tips we shared along the way will help you get to that 8 to 10 times multiple so we had a great potato Harvest in the raids beds this year not our all-time best Harvest but a great harvest nonetheless if you want to see our best Harvest ever from my raised beds watch this video right here we'll show you how we got a 37 times multiple on one particular variety a year or so ago so check that out and we'll see you next time right here at Lazy Dog Farm

Channel: Lazy Dog Farm

Views: 6,465

Keywords: backyard gardening, organic gardening, sustainable living, vegetable gardening, vegetable garden, homestead, homesteading, homestead garden, organic food, small farm, sustainable agriculture, home garden, sustainable farming, sustainable food, organic garden, backyard garden, home gardening, garden advice, garden tips, garden techniques, gardening tips, garden seeds, garden varieties, gardening, garden, how to garden, grow your own food, kitchen garden, clean food

Id: wBuIjlii2EM

Length: 31min 19sec (1879 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 08 2024