In this video we're going to learn
how to take a whole bunch of potatoes, one of my favorite crops of all time,
and plant them directly in the ground. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it's my goal to help
you grow a greener thumb. These really are one of my
favorite crops of all time. I have six different varieties here.
I'm going to show you all of them, but what we're going to do is
plant them directly in the ground. I haven't done that except for one
other time back in 2019 in my survival challenge, where I grew maybe a
hundredish pounds of potatoes or so, and tried to live off of those
as well as some other fishing, foraging - that type of thing.
Got a whole video on that. It's actually quite interesting. I lost a lot of weight and I lost a lot
of muscle and I'm probably still dealing with the aftereffects of that. So it's
not recommended. But, what we're doing, we're going to take six
different varieties, put
them in the ground over here, right next to the Epic Shed.
So without further ado, cultivate that Like button and I will
multiply your potatoes by a factor of 10. And let's get into the video. First potato
on our list is the Chieftain potato. You can see we already
have some eyes sprouting. I'm not going to cut any of these
mostly because I don't want to wait. But if you want to, you
could slice in half, let it scab over and you'd get some extra
growth. Next up. We've got Tara Rose. This one is a beautiful looking
smaller potato. Honestly, very excited about this one. Extremely excited about the
French fingerlings right here, a prized culinary potato.
Again, it is chitting out. Chitting is the verb that refers
to the sprouting of the eyes there. Interesting phrase, I don't
tend to use it that much. Next we've got Russet Burbank, the classic potato that we probably all
see in the sacks at the grocery stores. Here we've got a really small
one. This is Russian banana. Now, as the name would imply, you can see it's kind of a petite sort
of banana-esque shaped looking potato that I'm very excited about. Never grown
those before. And then finally here, we've got the Red Pontiac, which is a classic and you really
just can't go wrong. I find for me, reds are some of the most productive
and that's why I have a decent amount of them. So here's the area
that I want to plant it in. It's going to be directly in the ground. You can see I've done a little bit
of testing of this ground already. And I've had incredible success growing
potatoes directly in our native soil here in San Diego, California. It is a little heavier in clay and
I'm going to use a modified Ruth Stout method. For those of you who don't know, Ruth Stout was a gardener way back when, who basically just dropped potatoes
on the ground and covered them in hay. Now I'm not going to do exactly
that. That's why I said modified. So the first thing I want to do, remember I have six varieties and I
have six potatoes in each variety. So I have a total of 36. I'm
not cutting them up at all. So what I want to do is measure
out roughly a six by six area. We're going to plant one every foot
or so. We're going to go quite dense. So let's go ahead and get that started. I want to start at the
shadow line of the shed. I don't want too much shadow being
cast. Morning shade, totally fine. But right now, right around this
line is going to be perfect. And we're going to edge it up just
to the beginning of the shed here. We've got our four. Corners. I've roughly cleared
out the area. Now, like I said, I've had success growing in this
type of soil before with potatoes. They're sort of a pioneer crop. You can throw them in relatively crappy
soil and they will do okay. However, I can't really bury them in this. So I am going to loosen
it up just a little bit. I'm going to throw six
foot long rows down. I won't loosen up the entire
thing or till up the entire thing. Now what Ruth Stout would have done is
she would have just dropped and covered with hay or straw. I'm
going to be using straw. I'm going to modify that a little bit. I'm going to go about four to
five inches down on my potato. I found personally that burying
it just a little bit deeper, tends to have more success, and you
don't have to worry about hilling it, which is something that
Ruth Stout also didn't do. So I am going to not hill these potatoes, which is classic advice that
I find is just honestly, too much effort for too little reward. So we have the basic structure
of our trenches dug out. I want to smooth out some
of the inconsistencies in
the depth and brush away some of the soil before we get to
planting. All right, our trenches are dug. They're relatively even, they're
about three or four inches deep. We can mound slightly if we want
to, we don't have to. I've, again, found that planting about four inches
deep and just not doing anything besides mulching will produce a
nice amount of potatoes. So I have all my varieties here. Make sure you label them before
you put them in the ground. But let's go ahead and get them in. Okay, we're going to go in with
our Red Pontiacs first. Eyes up and then we'll just
place it right down in here. About a foot, foot and a half spacing I would
say is the absolute minimum. So we're going to just
test fit these here. Eyes up for the obvious reasons that
you don't want your plant to stall out simply because the eyes
have to reroute themselves. Through a better path in the soil. So just don't do that. We'll
clear some of this out right here. Our last one will go in right there
and then we'll cover these up. And I'm going to leave. These right here for labeling later. Next up on this row is the
critical element and that
would be the mulch. Again, I'm using a shredded straw
mulch called GardenStraw here, but you can use all sorts of stuff. With potatoes it's really just
about keeping the soil moist, not really having to
worry about them too much. You want them to be a set it
and forget it type of crop. You don't want to have to heavily
manage them because again, they are designed to be an easy crop.
They're just a simple one to grow. So about three or four inches of
mulch down on top of this row. And then we'll rinse and repeat with
the rest of our six different varieties. I've given the beds a little bit of a
tidy up. I think they look pretty nice. Maybe I'll put a border around
here or something like that. But as I water these in, just some final thoughts on the planting
phase of the process of potatoes. Again, you don't necessarily have
to wait for the eyes to sprout. That's a common misconception. Potatoes will come back if you just forget
them in the ground after harvesting. So it follows that they don't necessarily
need to have the eyes sprouted out to reproduce. So I put a couple
- these two right here, they weren't chitted out
yet. It's totally fine. They'll just probably be a little
bit slower on the take. And again, I'm planting these semi out of season. The benefit of living in San Diego is
that I can plant things slightly out of season. And then by the
time it's ready to harvest, all you guys can probably
start planting it. Which means that the video comes out
when it's actually useful to you, which is really nice. And I have to say, I'm feeling like I'm finally living my
fantasy here at the Epic Homestead of basically playing Harvest Moon
or Stardew Valley in real life. Shout out to anyone in the Comments if
you play those games or if you have a kid that plays those games. Just, what
a wholesome way to spend time, if you're going to spend it on the
computer. A fantastic way to spend time. You actually learn a lot of real world
skills. And I've got my potato crop here. So you want to water it in. They don't need a ton of water when
they're just starting to sprout because again, they need to form roots first. Then the shoot will
come up and after that, then you can start regularly
watering. But again, if you live in an area with
a decent amount of rain, you probably don't need to do a lot
of watering in general. In fact, even here in San Diego, last spring
I planted much in a similar fashion, although it was at a friend's property
and I just let the natural rainfall irrigate them. And I got 25 pounds off of about
five pounds worth of seed potatoes. And so to me, that's a five to one
ratio. I'm really pleased with that. And for no extra work, remember
no hilling and no watering, it's free food. I mean,
it really is free food. I spent about an hour here today and I'm
going to get free food in just about 80 to 110 days, depending on
the variety here. All right, our potatoes are in the ground.
We've got to give it some time. So the next time I see you,
we'll have some early sprouts. And we'll talk about the care during the
growing phase where they're putting out all those stolons and forming. Those new potatoes. So it's been about 30 or. 45 Days since we planted
our seed potatoes. And I wanted to talk about just a couple
of things that you might notice when you are starting out your potatoes
in this early stage of growth. Basically the stage where the
seed potato is starting to sprout. It's going to come out of the soil and
it's going to be growing up to actually what looks like a really
beautiful potato patch. So I'm expecting at least a hundred pounds
of potatoes out of this little patch here. Now what you'll notice,
over there in the foreground, is those potatoes are looking a
little bit stunted. Now, why is that? Well remember, your potatoes
are going to sprout. They're going to chit and you typically
plant them after they chit or after the eyes start to sprout just a
little bit of growth. Now, these four varieties right here, they were already chitting
when I put them in the ground. Those two over there were not. But I wanted to plant them at the
same time just to give you a sense of, you can break some of these rules with
potatoes or these conventional gardening rules and it's not going to ruin your
crop. It's just going to slow it down. So those ones took about three weeks
longer to get out of the ground. That's why they're stunted. They're
not stunted. They're just slower. They're behind in time. So
they'll catch up pretty soon. Now, a couple of things that we've done here
to make sure that this is one of our better crops of potatoes inground. You'll notice that there's quite
a bit of straw over the top. Now I used to just have straw right
down the row where I was planting the potato. Now we've gone ahead and let it
go over these hills here because we were noticing some roots starting
to creep out into the center. So we'd much rather cover
that up. And now again, I'm following a modified Ruth Stout
method where I'm not hilling these potatoes up like crazy. You can
see these potatoes right here, there's well over a foot of growth here, I would say about 18 inches of growth.
And I haven't hilled up that stem. I'm going for the lazy
potato approach where yes, maybe I get a little bit more yield by
hilling it up and using a lot of extra soil and a lot of extra work
quite frankly, but I don't
really want to do that. These were an easy crop for me to plant. I'm just going to let them sit
here and I'm going to wait. Now what I will do is I will add more
straw as a mulch to make sure that any potatoes that start to form don't
start getting hit by the sun. We don't want to solarize these potatoes
and really turn them into what we call a green potato, which is an unhealthy potato to eat
due to the high solanine content. And so at this point in time, it's
just keeping them well-watered, making sure that I add bits of straw here
and there to cover up anything that I see that's worth protecting.
And that's pretty much it. We're going to be back in a little bit
to take a look at when you know it's time to harvest. It has been a few more weeks. And there have been some updates, although it looks like not much has
happened in the potato patch. Number one, the Russian bananas, this small
low-growing one, it's come back. I mean, it was hit by some frost. It died back somewhat severely
and has now come back. So sometimes just waiting it out and
not freaking out can be the solution. However, right next to it these French fingerlings
have a problem that I need to take care of right away. So here are the
French fingerlings. And as you can see, we have this sort of black
mottled spotting on the leaves. It's not a pest, there's no real holes
in the leaves or anything like that. And it's not a watering issue because
then the rest of the plants would also be in trouble. So to me, this
looks like a potato blight. Now I could spray the French fingerlings
with some sort of organic fungicide. However, I want to really just eliminate the
chance that it gets to any other part of this potato bed. Seems like
those are more susceptible. Maybe these ones can stave it off. Who
knows? I'd rather not take the gamble. And French fingerlings, they've been
in the ground for about 75 days or so. So they will be new potatoes.
Fingerling potatoes are pretty prized, especially when they're young. I'm going to cut my losses
on this particular row. And we're going to grab the potato fork, which I have never used to
actually harvest potatoes, I've used it for a lot of other stuff, and harvest out this row to
protect the overall crop. So let's remove our little label
here, pop it out of the ground. And with the potato fork, what you want to do is you don't want
to harvest directly next to the potato because it's obviously
clustering potatoes everywhere. And so you want to come
in front of it and. Pull through it like that. So let's do this very carefully. Remember there's other potatoes
we don't want to damage here. So we want to get down in. And come in, give it a little kick maybe and just pull up. We'll see what we get. Oh yeah, baby! That's
what I'm talking about. Beautiful. Oh, oh, oh. These are nice potatoes. These
are nice. I'm going to get hyped, just so you know, I'm always going to
get hyped on these potatoes. Holy moly, these are nice. One plant,
four good ones, five good ones. Whooh! Yes. Tripped. I mean, just look at that
perfection. Look at the size. Look at the color. Look at the structure. These are going to be absolutely
delicious. Let's keep going. Here's a closer up. Oh. Just found another one. Holy. Crap, this is amazing. Okay. So again, here's the base of the potato
plant right about there, right? So you don't want to go in there cause
we just saw how many potatoes we pulled out. You want to go in front. Give it a little. Kick into the soil for some leverage. You don't want to stab
these beauties. And then. Let's give it a nice pull.
See what we get. On this one, looks like they were below what I
thought. You got one. Ooh. Yeah, there we go. Two, three. Fitting I'm doing this on
Easter because this is like. A treasure hunt. Four. Here's what we ended up with. Honestly,
I am extremely stoked about this. I planted five seed potatoes in
that row about this size or so. And I don't know the weight yet, but
these look beautiful. Number one, blemish free. I mean, they
look absolutely delicious! Gonna to be really tender and nice. And
the rest of the whole crop is now saved. So we've got our French fingerlings,
they're going to go inside. Check out the Epic Homesteading channel
if you want to see what I do with these potatoes. But the rest of these,
they've still got some time to go. I want them to size up
and get a huge yield. So I'll see you back here
in a couple of weeks. So we're back after maybe a week or
so from when we harvested these French fingerlings. So they had a
little bit of light on them. And I have to say it was the right call
and they've been absolutely delicious. Later on I will show you
one of my favorite potato
preparations after we harvest this out, which is
exactly what we're doing. So how do you know when it's
time to harvest your potatoes? The most obvious indicator is just the
days to maturity of that particular potato variety. So you might see
at 85 days you might see 110, 115, 120 days or so. And if
it's been that much time, provided everything else has gone
well, the potato should be ready to go. But there are a couple of visual
indicators that I want you to look for. So one of the key things you want to
look for is some leaf yellowing and leaf dieback, which we're seeing here. This could be a blight thing but it really
doesn't look like the blight that we just saw earlier in the video. So
this to me, it's been long enough. I feel like this is a good sign. You're
going to start seeing them die back. You might see them brown a little
bit. They'll droop a little bit. And what's happening is all the energy
is really being sent down to those tubers for those delicious potatoes
that we want to harvest. So that's a really good sign. Sometimes
you may even see potato berries form, depending on the variety.
Potatoes will form a berry. You don't want to eat that
berry. But it will form up here. You'll see some flowers and stuff.
That's a good sign you have new potatoes. When the berries form
and fall off and stuff, that's a good sign that your
potatoes are pretty much ready to go. So let's harvest these. What I
want to do, the sun's getting low, I need a little bit of extra help. And I wanna introduce all of you guys
to someone who's been helping out a lot around here at the Epic Homestead,
my garden manager Jacques. Hey, I'm Jacques. So Jacques is here.
Jacques been helping out quite a bit. That's why so much is getting done around
here because there's so much to do in the Epic Gardening world. We have your trusty favorite tool
that you've been using for just about everything here, Jacques, the potato fork. I've been waiting for the moment to
actually get potatoes with that thing. He's been using it for everything
BUT potatoes here at the Homestead. And so now we're actually
going to use it with potatoes. So when you harvest potatoes, there's
a lot of ways you could do it. So what you could do, let's take
these Russian bananas for example, is you could just grab it at the base
and pull it up and then you could go digging and hunting and
that's completely fine. But if you want to get a
little fun and a little spicy, you could also come in with a potato fork, come in front like we did before and
pull up. So it's really dealer's choice. You could do it whichever way you
want. I'll give this to you Jacques. Maybe you start over there. Yep. I'm
gonna start over here. Ooh, there's, look at this dude! There's tons of
little ones here. Interesting. Ooh, that's a nice little,
little, little tatie. So Jacques has found something in the
Chieftain potatoes. What have you found? Look at that. Looks at
that. Perfect potato. That's a beauty. That's a beauty.
That's just on the first one. That's just easy too.
Okay. Let's let's go POV. POV harvest right here. There
you go. There's another one. You're gonna have to dig around in
there probably. A couple of little guys. Couple little guys. If we don't see
another big one, I'm going to be sad. Oh, that's the perfect potato.
There we go, baby. Honestly, it's like Easter every single day.
It's like Easter. Keeps giving. It just keeps on giving, baby. All right. I'm going to go over
here and check mine out. All right. So I'm coming over and I'm in on
the Red Pontiacs. And look at this. This is crazy. They're
just bunched up right here. So I'm going to do the pull method
here. We'll give it a quick pull. See what we get. Oh
yeah. Oh yeah. One, two, three. We don't stop, four
and never forget about these
little guys here. These, I call them taties. They're the small
boys. There's a couple ones in here. Okay, that's a pretty good yield on that,
but there's probably more. Yep. One. Oh my. Dude, look
at this one. Oh wow! That's beast. Okay. That's a big boy. So this trenching method. Remember, you guys saw what we
put in at the beginning. Probably put in this
and we're getting this. Is it the biggest yield per potato
you could get? It's definitely not, but also zero work. So that's really
the trade off that you need to do. Okay. The final row. Tara Rose,
very pleased about this one. These are the ones that I put in before
they were chitting, which is the sprout. And so they were slow to start, but
they look like they're pretty healthy. That could mean that they're
actually just a little bit behind, a little bit younger, so
they're not yellowing and stuff. So that could mean that the
harvest will be smaller. Maybe it means the
harvest is perfectly fine. So there's only one way to find out and
that's to get in there and pull them up. I'm pretty optimistic about this.
Tara Rose has an interesting color. It's sort of like this, I don't know, like crystalline type of red on the
interior. Looks almost like a gem. So let's pull it up
and see what we've got. Nothing on that because they're all
in the ground. It's much darker. Look at the darkness on this, much
darker. All right. Let's dig in here. So welcome to the potato bounty. I will say I'm going to
estimate probably about 40ish, pounds of potatoes perhaps from
six to eight pounds planted. Remember the French fingerling should be
here and I've even eaten some of those. So that's probably another 10
pounds. Really solid yield. There were some issues for sure. Like
the Russet Burbanks underperformed. I think I could have trenched
those a little bit deeper. The Russian bananas got a little frost. You could see the ones in the
back were a little better. The ones that didn't get hit by the frost. The ones in the front were a
little smaller. That's fine. I just have delicate
delicacy potatoes now. So what I want to do is actually show
you one of my favorite preparations for potatoes called the
smashed potato, indoors. Welcome to the inside of my house.
I almost never show you guys this, but here we are in Kev's kitchen and
we're going to learn how to make my favorite potato recipe. The one
that I make probably the most, second only to a diner style hash brown, which I mastered during the
Apocalypse Grow Challenge in 2019, where I was living off the whole
garden. Potatoes were a staple crop. I've got some French fingerlings. I'm gonna show you how to make smashed
potatoes, not mashed, but smashed. So I've got a few potatoes here. These
are our French fingerling babies. We got to boil this water first though, because we need to soften up
the potato in order to smash it. So let's turn this on. We're going
to mix in just a little bit of salt. We're going to boil this and I'll
be back in just a second. All right. We are boiling. Let's put
our three fingerlings in, probably take about 25
minutes to soften them up. So I'll see you back in another 25. While we're waiting for
those taties to soften up, let's go ahead and just top off our
rosemary and we'll use some of this for a topping. So take a look. I've
done a video on rosemary before. We can just prune right here.
There's two side shoots coming out. So this will bush up really nicely. And top the plants off and we have a
nice sprig that we can use indoors. Alright, we are ready to go with some
nice softened up potatoes. I tell you, this little mesh thing that goes
over the sink is a lifesaver. We're going let these guys hang out and
sort of steam dry a little bit for maybe three or four minutes. So this is
where you gotta be on your game. This is the smashed part
of the smashed potato. So I'm taking the lid of the same pan
that I used and you want to smash it down. The thinner you go,
the crispier it will be. And you want it to be uniform
and not break apart too much. So let's see if I can do that in
this video here. Ooh, that felt good. That felt good. Okay. That
feels like a good smash. That's perfect, actually. Okay. That's
perfect. Look at that. Look at that. Okay. Let's do this one. Oh, that is so satisfying. Satisfaction
level 9,000, over 9,000 actually. Okay. We're coming in with some butter that I
will put a little bit of that rosemary we chopped up into. Let's do
a quick drizzle of the butter. These aren't healthy. I'll tell you that right now because
I'm throwing a bunch of oil on them. We're doing olive oil next. We want
the crisp factor to be at maximum, absolute maximum. Gonna
hit it with some pepper. And then I'm going to do a little
bit of a sprinkle with some salt. And I think we're good to go.
I've preheated to 390 Fahrenheit. We're going to go in for about 45 to
55 minutes and we are not going to flip these. See you soon. All right.
The moment of truth, my friends. Let's see if the crispiness
is at the levels we desire. I mean, that looks pretty
good to me. Here we go. Almost three months of growing,
actually a little bit longer, but not a lot of work
to grow these potatoes. And here they are sitting in front of me. Let's just take a quick little crunch
here. Oh, that is going to be crunchy. The thinner you go. That is. That is so good! It's
really hard to describe. It's 20% flavor boost
if you grow it yourself. If you cook it with tons of
fat and oil, 20% flavor boost. And it's just so good and
it's so easy to grow guys. Potatoes will never not be grown in my
garden. I'm always going to grow them. I hope this guide was helpful. If you want to see more messing
around and fun cooking videos, Homestead stuff like that, go
on over to Epic Homesteading. I do like to do these full
grow guides from time to time. To go seed all the way to
harvest, all the way to kitchen. But it's not gonna be super frequent
here on the Epic Gardening channel. Go over to Epic Homesteading for a
little bit more of the inside the house stuff. But I hope you guys enjoyed the
video. I'm going to enjoy the potaties. I will see you guys next time. Good
luck in the garden and keep on growing.
