How to Grow Potatoes, Seed to MASSIVE Harvest

well today's video is sponsored by a black gold compost company we want to thank the good people over black gold for their generous donation of all this black cow commodore that we're using in our video today thank you for sponsoring our channel well good morning friends had some subscribers been requesting us to do a potato video on uh growing them in raised beds so i was going to do that last year but i simply ran out of time didn't get them planted but this year i'm going to do it i'm going to be doing that today on today's video so stick around let's get into some detail about how we're going to do that be right back [Music] well welcome back friends here's a little picture i drew up that might make this day's demonstration a little easier to understand the variety of potato that we're going to be growing in the raised bed is a norlin red this is a determinate potato it's early to harvest potatoes it only takes 70 to 90 days to harvest so you want to plant these early as you can and here in florida i'm going to be planting them today is uh february the 18th 2022 and our our nighttime lows are above 40 degrees now so this is when i want to plant it as fast as i can because they only take 70 to 90 degrees and they grow best when it's 60 to 80 degrees so here in florida it doesn't take very long before that 80 degree temperature right there is well exceeded during the daytime so i want to get them in in february for that reason because i don't want it to get so hot so fast that the plants are just you know fried and i don't get a very good harvest or very big harvest so anyway that's why i'm doing it 40 degrees at night and trying to get them out before it gets up too hot this is a red skinned potato with a white flesh and nancy uses them all the time i i especially like them in the crock pot but she has all kinds of little um recipes that she uses these for and so used they're very good for bacon boiling and frying so those are um you know the kind of the little particulars on the potato so let me get the little camera here a little close on this diagram and let's take a look at that together okay here's a little closer picture of the diagram maybe this will be a little bit easier to see the first thing i'm going to do when i go out to the raised bed is i'm going to dig a furrow that's going to be right at about eight inches deep from the ground level to the bottom and then i'm going to add in a balanced fertilizer in the bottom of the furrow i'm going to put in triple tin the reason for that is is my florida sandy soil is very poor in nutrients and the potatoes are actually big feeders or heavy feeders so they're going to need a little extra that they sure are not going to pull out of my soil so i'm going to help them out by giving them a little bit of triple tin and then i'm going to cover up that fertilizer to where it's about five inches of cover so that the seed potato will be one inch above where the fertilizer is so it's not just sitting right in the fertilizer so once i get that in and i'll cover it up back up to three inch below the ground level then i'll put in a seed potato and i put in the seed potatoes every 10 or 12 inches apart and then i will cover up the seed potato back up to the soil level and then in about three or four weeks we'll come back and we'll heal up the plants that have emerged will start to heal the healing process of keeping those plants healed up you know until we harvest so that's how we're going to do it there's really nothing to it it's very easy if you have more than one row i just have one single row because i have a 50 foot raised bed but if if you have a raised bed that you know you're going to put two or three rows in it or whatever then you want i i recommend putting the rows about 36 inches apart it gives you plenty of room to work in there and and to do your healing and also when you get ready to harvest it makes it a little easier as well so there we go there's the diagram now let me show you the seed potato that we're going to be using today out there in a bed okay here's our seed potato me and nancy bought these at our local seed and feed and we went down there and got you know 50 pounds of uh northern reds and kennebec whites for like 15 bucks so for me that's the easiest way to do that is just buy them locally you can order seed potatoes online and from all the big seed suppliers and they're available but they can get a little on a pricey side if you're trying to buy seed potatoes and then also you know the shipping kind of is differs from area to area so you you may not exactly get them when you really want them and you end up paying a little bit more so i recommend looking for them locally and you're going to get a good certified disease-free seed potato the reason that i don't like to use potatoes out of the grocery store is because they are not certified disease-free and you could introduce fungus and viruses into your soil from the potatoes that you get from the store and then you got that virus in your soil so i like to get disease certified disease-free seed potatoes when i'm going to grow them in the ground okay now today these seed potatoes were so inexpensive and i got such a high quantity of them i'm not going to have to cut these potatoes and let them scab over and try to stretch out the amount of plants i can get per potato so i'm just going to plant the whole potato in the ground since i have an abundance of them but if you want to you can do that you can buy less potatoes you can cut them and leave yourself at least two eyes on each piece let them scab over with that where the flesh is exposed and then you can plant them in the ground that way i don't particularly like to do that in the ground because i don't want to run the risk of that flesh exposed flesh even though it's scabbed over and so-called healed i still don't want to run the risk of getting fungus or any other kind of disease into that flesh and rotting my potato so i want to go ahead and reduce my risk by putting the whole potato in the ground and i never really saw that it made any much difference if i had a whole potato or a piece of potato they seem to do about the same to me and over in the containers when we peel them into containers we always try to make sure that we have a chit pointing up but if i'm going out here in the ground like this i'm not going to worry about that at all i don't think it makes much difference i'm just going to stick it in the ground and let her grow and it'll do its thing so anyway there we go that's the seed potato that we're going to be using today and um be planting them whole and we'll pull back some of the small ones and we'll plant those in some five gallon buckets but i'll probably be doing that tomorrow but we will pull back some of the smaller ones just because nancy likes to have some five gallon buckets available so when she's cooking she can just go out and get a harvest one bucket full and she gets plenty of potatoes for two or three meals and they're fresh new potatoes and you really can't beat the taste and those little potatoes are you know new potatoes are pretty small when you buy those in the store they're called baby reds and that's what you're really getting is a new potato that's a norlin red it's it's just a little tiny potato immature potato but it's got a wonderful flavor so anyway we'll be doing some of those for miss nancy and you know we'll show it on the video as well and kind of watch that and then just watch videos that nancy makes and you'll see her harvesting and cooking them so anyway let's head on out there to the uh to the garden complex because we got a lot to do today let's get started well it's tater day oh yeah i love those things here's our sea potatoes that we got from our local our local supplier guy i was we were talking about earlier oh they're beautiful honey yep a lot of taters you know another whole bag full here i don't know how much of these we're going to really need all at one time but anyway what i want to do is um we want to take out pick out yourself like about 15 of them about that size right there that right there is the perfect size to put in a um five gallon bucket like this and that's what nancy's going to grow over here on the side so she can come out and harvest at will so go ahead you can get out about 15 15 of them set them aside and we'll take these bigger ones and um we'll put them over here in a raised bed i just want to stick them in here so i got something to carry on these are nice potatoes pretty good ones yeah okay there we go we got our seed potatoes separated out nancy's got a nice little nice little collection there of uh little little the small ones for the uh five gallon buckets we got two uh but big buckets here full of the whole seed potatoes or the raised bed and this right here i just wanted to show you here it came with a uh a certified free disease-free seed potato it comes with the bag so these things are certified disease-free remember us talking about that right so there we go we got some good old taters here ready to go in the ground over there and uh let's go over there we're gonna have to get the bed prepped we used that bed for the first time in the fall it did really good it produced real well i'm going to freshen it up with some more black cow animal compost and put that in and incorporate that in the soil and then we'll get it off ready to go get the furrow in there and we'll start putting them seed potatoes in the ground you ready you sound like you're about as ready as i am no i'm looking forward to canning all these it's gonna be fun oh boy and cooking it you've been uh canning for the last three days carrots so yeah carrots a lot of carrots because we've got a lot of carrots well anything you can can is in uh in our favor especially the way the economy is and the food shortages and i mean it is a good time to have a garden man it really is and the prices keep just skyrocketing and everything oh yes i don't know how people can afford to eat if they don't grow it yet themselves yeah please try to hone up on some of your gardening skill sets and start learning how to do some of this for yourself and pass it on to your children let them learn that experience while they're young carry it their whole life so let's go over there and get this thing started all right [Music] you [Music] so foreign [Music] do [Music] do you [Music] bye [Music] do [Music] foreign do [Music] well there we go got us a road norlin reds installed ready to grow miss nancy's watering them in lightly right now just to get them moistened up just a little these um these aren't going to need a whole lot of water um until you start to see the plants emerge so this right here is really just enough to get it wet enough to mash some of that air out of the soil that i just planted it in squeeze out some of my air pockets so anyway we'll be back in the days ahead and uh we'll watch the progression of this all the way out to harvest i'm a little tired now 69 years old i can't do too much that's a lot for one day for me yeah so anyway we ain't no spring chickens but we got the potatoes in the ground uh we'll come out here in the morning we'll put your um your little uh new potatoes in the five gallon buckets and we'll do that on the same video here so maybe it'll be fun to watch so we'll see you back in the morning [Music] you so do [Music] so [Music] well good morning friends i got up bright and early this morning and came out here and mixed up a bunch of my container mix and to plant nancy's um little baby reds that she wanted in the five gallon buckets from them a few of them leftover seed potatoes we had from yesterday so um this is really a video on how to grow them in a raised bed but i just wanted to you know show you this just in case you may want to do them in here as well we do have plenty of videos on growing container grown potatoes so for some of you old timers i know y'all have seen them all but um for you new subscribers that are just joining up um the the container mix that i made up the soil that i made up here we have a video on our channel on how to make container mix at home go check out that video and show you how i did that and we also have two really good videos very detailed tutorials on how to grow potatoes and five gallon buckets and of course nancy will give you you know a thumbnail and a link to those two videos as well so i got up this morning and i planted them i i got 12 bucketfuls i got six here and six down yonder at the other end and nancy should have plenty of baby reds um this summer to enjoy with some some of her fine cuisine so we'll be back in the days ahead and we'll especially watch what's going on in that raised bed over there and um you'll see nancy coming out on some of her cooking videos and harvesting these buckets whenever she needs one so you'll see these on other videos as they progress so we'll be back in the days ahead as soon as our potatoes break ground over there in the raised bed and we'll take a look at that and what will be our next step after that so we'll see you soon [Music] do [Music] well welcome back friends it's been seven days since me and nancy planted this stand of northern red potatoes and as you can see they're starting to break the surface here hitting the green point and unfortunately we have an arctic blast of air coming down tonight going down to 27 degrees very unusual for this time of the year but we're bracing for impact there's not a whole lot i can do about this um if this this tender green foliage gets frozen and burned back hopefully the the seed potato below will sprout out a new stem and we'll get some more some some more foliage and you know another week from now so we're just gonna have to instead of hope for the best we got to pray for the best that uh our our potatoes survive and uh we can finally get through this so we'll be back in about a week and see where where we stand see you then [Music] well welcome back we survived a arctic blast last night and i think we might have come through it fairly good unscathed really we covered up all of our little potatoes that have we're just starting to break the surface with one of our uh containers and we just got through taking them off and the plants look pretty healthy there may have been a little bit of um wilting in some of them i think it's just simply because of the cold temperature not not frost so we they we protected them from actually being hit with ice particles so i think they're going to be okay we'll be back let's give this a few more days to recover we got some warmer weather coming this week and we'll take a look at it and we'll continue working on our little diagram of how to grow these potatoes in the ground together so we'll be back soon [Music] well welcome back friends been eight days since our last update with you on our potatoes if you'll remember back eight days ago we had that freeze that came through here and caught us off guard you know we had a few of the potatoes that had already broke the surface of the soil and they had some some foliage you know above the soil level so we tried our best to cover those up but luckily most of the potatoes had not emerged yet so they were still below the soil level and they were safe and protected from the freeze you know from the soil itself so that was good so here we are eight days later they've been in the ground about 31 days now and i just wanted to walk you through the diagram real quick and tell you where we're at with the taters at this point today we are at stage one what i call sprout development stage what happened is as we planted our seed potato and they started to sprout develop sprouts from the chits on the seed potato and they grow upward and they emerge from the soil and when those leaves break the ground surface right there you'll see some leaves right on the ground this is what i call the green point and that shows you usually about two to three weeks after you plant the seed potato you'll see these leaves on the surface right here and for determinate potatoes which is what these norlen reds are they're determinate there will be no potatoes will form above the green point no matter how much soil i pile up on top of and heal it up it was not going to grow any more potatoes above this point they will all develop below the green point okay so keep that in mind um at this point once you see the the foliage come up you've if you're you're in stage one it's at this point you want to start your watering schedule and the way i do it is i water about one inch of water every seven to ten days remember potatoes are pretty drought tolerant so you don't have to really worry too much about them they're pretty tough the only time i worry about the water is if i see wilton on my potatoes in the morning if i go out in the morning and there's some wilting showing on the leaves then all i do is i increase the the amount of water i'm giving them and i or i may you know increase the frequency of the water right now i'm every seven to ten days and if i'm not showing any wilt then that's fine if i go out in you know 10 days or so and i see some wilt in the morning i might cut that back to every seven days but it's kind of a depends on how the weather pattern is in your particular area the type of soil you have the time of temperatures that you're experiencing a few of these things come into play when you when you start trying to determine your water the best thing i can tell you is let your plants talk to you let them tell you what they want if you see them wilton in the morning they're telling you that they're thirsty and they would like to have a little bit more water than what you're giving them so that's how i do it we're in stage one fully now and i thought we'd just go out here and um go to the uh garden complex and take a look at where our potatoes are at this point well here's our taters out here in the raised bed and some of them are looking really pretty good and as you can see some of them are much bigger than the others and a lot of that comes from just a bigger seed potato that had a much more developed chit on it when we planted it and then we had some that were very small seed potatoes and they had no signs of chits at all and they're just taking a little bit longer to reach stage one so there's nothing to be concerned about at all just because you have some that are bigger than the others it's no big deal but they're looking beautiful what i'm going to do is i'm going to give these two or three more weeks and let the little tiny ones catch up a little bit with the larger ones and at that point we'll go to the next step in our um potato journey here together and we'll show you what what comes next so until men nice to see you back here in a couple of weeks we'll let them continue to grow have a good one [Music] do [Music] well welcome back friends looks like we're heading into stage two of our uh our taters um it's only been a week since the last time i talked to you i thought they would take a little bit longer to get to this this point but these things are coming on pretty strong so this is a perfect tater growing weather we're having right now it's in the upper 40s at night and only goes up to about 85 during the day taters love it so they're doing pretty good um they've only been in the ground for about six weeks today so i thought what we do is just take a look at the book see where we're at and see what's going on technically and then we'll come back out here and we'll do some work that needs to be done to these taters today let's head in the shop and take a look at the book okay we made it back over to the shop um remember last week we talked about stage one and the sprout development of our plants and today i wanted to go into stage two is which is called the vegetative growth stage and for me on this particular type of a variety of potato we're looking at six this is approximately six weeks since we planted our seed potatoes together so you know different varieties take different times to get to this stage so um you know i'm just this is just a generic timeline basically using the norland red potato as an example so there it's it's different for different types of varieties of potatoes as well as the weather conditions in your particular area so anyway this is just a generic guide to show you the stages of the development of the potato and the day we're at stage two so there's some things that we need to do when we hit stage two you'll see the leaves developing above the ground which they've done very well and below the ground you're starting to get roots and stalins these stalins are really a thicker root that comes out which will later produce the tuber which will eventually become a potato so at this stage uh when you see this much vegetative growth when it's about eight ten inches tall when it gets to that point you want to start setting up your watering for once every seven to ten days depending on the weather conditions in your area you don't want to over water these potatoes they're pretty drought tolerant like we talked about earlier but you definitely don't want to let these plants wilt and once they start getting into this stage the the leaves are pulling in a lot of photosynthesis the roots are starting to grow the roots are trying to support the plant so everything's working together at that point we're going to need to start setting up our water schedule of every about one inch every seven to ten days and of course if it rains just don't water just skip it and let it go another week so that's what we need to do at this point you know there's some attention that needs to be done if you'll remember when we planted these seed potatoes they were it was just at ground level now the plants getting pretty tall and at this point there's some some attention needs to be given the first thing i'm going to do is i want to side dress both sides of the plant with a triple 10 fertilizer i don't like to put the fertilizer right on top of the plant i like to put it to the side it's called side dressing so i put it down this side of the row and also on this side of the row and what i like to do which i don't know if everybody does it that's just how i do it i like to take my little cultivator and i like to cultivate in that fertilizer that i side dress this with to incorporate and blend in with the soil that's there and that softens up that soil on this side as well as this side of the row and it has that fertilizer evenly distributed in there so it's not bunched up and what i call creating hot spots i don't want any hot spots of fertilizer on here which is going to damage my plant so once i get the thing cultivated i'll go back with my hard rake and all i do is simply pull that soil that i just cultivated and i'll create me a hill i'll go down one side and hill up then i'll come down the other side and he'll up pulling that in that fertilizer that's been incorporated into that soil up there with it and i like to get it about eight inches high get about an eight inch high hill and if you start getting some plant leaves and stems and stuff that are getting buried don't even worry about that that plant is going to do fine without with sacrificing a couple of those leaves on the bottom so don't worry about that and this right here probably needs to be repeated every three or four weeks as needed so just keep your eye on it if you get a lot of rain and you see this beating down or you see it getting kind of flat again go back and heal it back up and at that time if the plants are not looking real green and healthy i'll go ahead and hit it with a little more fertilizer at the same time to keep it going so that's where we're at today the plan of the day is i'm going to fertilize and side dress the row i'm going to cultivate a row and then i'm going to heal the row so let's head on out there to the garden complex to the raised bed with these and we'll take a look at them up close and let's get started well here we are back out at the garden complex at the at the tater raised bed uh as you can see the the taters are doing beautiful you can look all the way down the line and see i've got a pretty much fairly even stand of potato plants at this point so come on up and let's take a look at the the difference in the two sizes of the plants some you know remember some were straggling behind let's check that out yeah last week remember these uh we had some stragglers that were slow to slow to come up and they were much smaller than some of the other plants and um just in just a week's time you can see that this plant now is up several inches eight to ten inches above the ground level and here's the plant that was ahead of it last week so they do get to go on pretty rapidly and you don't have to wait very long and at this point you know i can safely easily heal up this entire row without having to worry about any that are just a little bit underdeveloped and burying them a little bit too deep okay looks like we're ready to get started i want to um you know first of all i want to side dress the row with triple ten then i'm going to cultivate that both sides of the row and then we're going to rake and pull that cultivated fertilized soil up on and heal these plants all the way down about eight to ten inches high that'll give it plenty of support you know there's a lot of heavy wind and rain coming especially in the month of april for us down here in florida so if i heal these plants up that's going to help support them so they don't break over in the wind and rain it also in the days ahead when we start to develop tubers i want to have enough soil up there to protect the potatoes that are forming down there from sunlight and we'll go into that later on a little more deeper but right now it's time to get the day's chore over with and get that get that set because i think we're going to fix it to get some rain i was going to try to water these today but i don't know if i want to water if i'm fixing to get a big storm so uh you know sometimes god saves me a lot of trouble by just giving me some free rain with some free fertilizer mixed in there with it so anyway let's get started on today's work and and get this stand of potatoes off and running me [Music] so huh [Music] so [Applause] [Applause] [Music] baby [Music] huh [Music] do and so [Music] maybe it's just me but i think a hill a freshly healed up row of taters is beautiful i just love the way hill rose look but there it is all healed up we'll be back in the days ahead and we'll continue to monitor the progress of these as we head into stage three four and five we'll do that together all the way through and uh see if we can't uh learn a little bit about how to grow taters so we'll be back soon i got to get going because this fiction's poor see you later well welcome back friends today i wanted to continue with our diagram work and on our potatoes that we planted out in the raised bed and continue with our journey as these develop we've been 55 days since we planted our seed potato in the ground and we are now at the point of what we call stage three which is the tuber formation okay stage three now at stage three i know that i'm getting some tubers because i'm starting to see some little tiny flower busts to begin to appear right on the tips of the plants they're not in full bloom the bloom the buds haven't opened they're just little buds in some cases i see a little flower here or there but they're not really like opened up yet but i know that when i see those buds appear begin to show up that i know down here on the end tips of these stalins that were developing back in stage two that now i'm starting to develop a little baby tuber in other words it's a baby potato and really it's very small not really much bigger around than the tip of my finger so it's very small but it's getting started and that's when i know by looking at my plant that i am now in stage three very exciting so at this point there's um really not a whole lot i need to do to the plants what i need to do is i'll touch it up with some fertilizer down the both sides of the row i'm going to use triple 10 to side dress it i take a look at the heel i make sure the heel still looks real good and formed if it's beat down from rain or anything like that then i will pull that hill back up i don't believe i need to do anything with my heels they still look very intact they look very good so i think what i'm just going to do today is just going to side dress it and get it ready you know for another feeding because remember taters or heavy feeders so we have to be sure we keep them fed now at this point now that i see these blooms starting to form i want to be very consistent with my watering i want to keep it to about once every seven to ten days and i just water right at about one inch of water don't over water because now that potatoes are starting to form if you keep over watering you're going to end up rotting your potatoes so be very careful with that they're they're really actually pretty drought tolerant they don't really need a whole lot of water so if we can just give them one inch a week every seven to ten days they're happy and if you get some rain in that time period then just skip the water in and they they should be just fine so let's head on out to the earth earth to the raised bed garden and take a look at these plants and see how they look let's head on out well here we are at the raised bed that we planted our northern reds uh at 55 days ago and if you'll come up and take a look at this plant right here you can see that it's already developing some little buds on the very tip of the plant which is what we were talking about a few minutes ago in the shop so there's the little flowers starting to appear which tells me we're starting to get some baby tubers the whole row of the um of the potatoes are doing just fine they're all getting some good height they've got some beautiful plants nice foliage and that shows me that we've got a very overall healthy plant developing which is going to give us a great root system thereby producing some nice taters so today i got me some triple ten fertilizer i'm just going to simply side dress i just took another look at the at the heel the heel looks very very healthy there's nothing really i need to do that so this side dress is pretty easy i just simply get a handful and i lightly sprinkle right down the edge of the plants that way i'm not putting it right on the plant itself and then we'll water it in i'm actually fixing to get some rain so that that's working out good actually i can feel some sprinkles touching me right now so um if i can get this fertilizer down that'll be perfect so let me get that in and get these little plants nice and fed let's go right down the side and if your hills are starting to look mashed down or flattened out in any way just go ahead and take your rake and pull them back up up on the plant well i just got that stand of repetitor side dressed all the way down both sides i decided to go ahead and and dress up my heel a little bit just touch it up just so i can demonstrate y'all how to do it this is a hard tooth rig this is what i'm going to be using and there's really nothing to it so let me just do this just to be sure that y'all understand how to heal them because it's best to heal these because in the days ahead i know them taters are going to start forming here and it's best to go ahead and get them healed up because you don't want that sunlight to get down and touch on any of them taters and turn them green so it's probably best to be proactive and go ahead and heal them up again so let me get them healed up okay this is pretty easy procedure you see the fertilizer already down there you just go back here and just pull it right on up pull it up to the plant just like you're tucking it in well we got her done it's always better to be proactive and go ahead and go that extra mile and heal them even if you think they don't need it i guess i was in a hurry because i know it's going to rain a little while so i wanted to just get through but you can't really do that make yourself do what you know you need to do so that's what i did today i got the uh i got it healed up got it fertilized fed and uh we're fixing to start to get some rain it's actually sprinkling on me right now but i'm gonna run the overhead on it anyway because it looks like all i'm going to get is a very light sprinkle and that's not going to be enough to suit me because i want to make sure that that fertilizer has been saturated real good and washed on down so it's not laying on our roots and them just being dampened a little bit i don't want it to be too hot so let me get the sprinklers up and running and uh we'll be back in a few day in a few weeks we'll take another look at the progress of our red potatoes as they go into stage four see you soon [Music] well welcome back friends today is nine weeks since we planted our uh seed potatoes out in the raised bed 63 days so we have now entered into stage four of our potato development and uh if you'll remember you know these nolan reds variety is what we're growing and they really only take 70 to 90 days so they're they're really getting pretty close but um there's been a new development you know since the last time we talked we've been out at uh on at stage three you know that was only eight days ago and we saw some flower buds starting to develop and actually some flowers had started to open and we knew that we were starting to develop tubers at the tips of these stalins well we fertilized it and healed it and this you know eight days ago and it has just exploded the plants are huge now that are vibrant beautifully green and um these flowers that were on the tips are blooming these buds these buds are blooming now so whenever we see flower blooms on the tip of our uh our potato plants then we know that down below those little bitty tubers are now expanding and starting to make potatoes so at this point what we want to do is to be consistent with their water and keep it at seven to ten days don't change anything just keep right on going if it has been a while since you fertilized and at this point lightly fertilized i don't have to do it today because i just fertilized it eight days ago and it's doing just fine and you also want to check your heels if if the heels have been beat down from rain or irrigation or anything then heal it back up and the reason for that is is these these tubers down here are expanding and we don't want sunlight to be able to break through and hit any of these taters down here internal grain okay so you want to protect them from the sun so these um these plants are looking great if you'll keep in mind that if you're looking for some new potatoes when you see these flowers bloom like this in about three weeks after these flowers have appeared three weeks later you can start pulling up these plants and you'll get these new potatoes you know the ones that are about this big and they are very very delicious so um if you're looking for new potatoes three weeks after stage four blooming you can pull them and get some we like to put our new potatoes in five gallon buckets that way we can watch for the bloom and we know about what time they're ready to harvest then nancy can go out and she can dump out you know a bucket at the time whenever she wants it and get enough for two or three meals because you on in a five gallon bucket you get two or three pounds of new potatoes you know so that's a good way to stretch your potato harvest out in a way that um gets them to last longer and while we're out in the garden today we'll go over and take a look at the five gallon buckets if you remember at the beginning of the movie i just put some in some buckets so nancy would have some new potatoes we'll just take a look at them for fun just to see you know how pretty the plants are looking and how exciting this time is stage four is a very exciting time so let's head on out to the garden complex and let's take a look at these um tater plants and we'll also go over and take a look at the five gallon buckets over in a container garden and we'll check it out let's head on out well here we are out at the raised bed garden and this is our stand of uh northern red taters at stage four looking really nice had really an explosion of growth this week with that fertilizer and we also had a pretty good rain a couple of days ago unfortunately that heavy rain kind of knocked off a whole lot of the blooms but it was uh i should have came out and uh and filmed it when it was in you know had a lot of blooms on it'd be a lot more prettier but it's still um pretty nice you can see you know some of the blooms are still here and some of them are still opening up so it's still in stage four um this will last a little bit longer and we'll continue to watch it if you look down the row you can see that it's made some pretty vigorous growth just in uh eight days since i uh side-dressed it with the fertilizer and healed it so it's looking really pretty good um we're excited about it and looking forward to it so uh let's go over here to the uh to the uh container garden and let's take a look at those five gallon buckets that we set up for miss nancy that we started in the beginning of this video just to demonstrate how we uh get our little new potatoes you know what that she likes to make for uh individual meals let's go check it out well here we are over at the container our container garden and i've put out plenty of five gallon buckets for miss nancy um remember when we first started the video we planted about 12 buckets together we're up to about 30 buckets right now so we have plenty of new potatoes coming in all of these these three pallets here are all um norlin reds so they'll make you know the little baby red potatoes what they call baby reds right here's kind of a cool one we're trying out that's adirondack blues we're gonna give that a shot this year and we've also got a a little five gallon bucket stand over there of the adirondack reds and you know apparently you can get the adirondack reds and you can make pink mashed potatoes and the blues you can make blue mashed potatoes so i thought that would be kind of a cute thing to do when my grandson comes over i think he'll have fun with that i want to let him experience harvesting potatoes uh here pretty soon and i think i'm going to let him do you know some of the different colors and dump them out and you know look through them and then go in the house and cook them and let him experience that entire process i'm trying to introduce him to gardening as much as i can every chance i get so anyway it's fun it's a uh it's a thing that i like to pass on to my grandchild and i think we hope we need a whole new generation of gardeners desperately so anyway potatoes is a good thing in the buckets if you want to introduce a child to gardening because it's actually fun for them to do it you know so anyway i thank y'all for watching we'll be back in the days ahead and we'll as as these potatoes here as well as over there in the raised bed they enter into stage five that's when we're starting to get really serious and we get to do some harvesting so we'll be back in the days ahead uh these are 90 day potatoes today's about 65 days or so 60 something like that so we're getting close it won't be too much longer i'm gonna let these die all the way down i don't go by the days i that's just kind of a ballpark number i watch the plants i let the plants tell me when it's time and we'll go into that you know on our next episode when we um can go into stage five we'll go back and get on the diagram and take a look at that together then we'll come out and do it so we'll see you soon [Music] well welcome back friends you know for most gardeners the main goal to strive toward is to have a beautiful plant that's vigorous green healthy full of blooms lots of fruit it's just you put all your love into that thing to to bring it from a seed all the way up to a beautiful plant but for the tater farmer hey man the main goal is to bring that plant up to the point where you can see it die back because at that point you've been a successful potato guy and you've ended up with some nice taters underneath so today our our potatoes that we've been growing out there in the the raised bed they've been growing about 95 days and they have at this point reached the stage five maturation stage now these uh red new orleans that we're growing they usually last about 70 to 90 days but uh these have gone a little bit longer i'm at 95 days right now and i can probably go another five six days which is what i'm going to do but um at this stage you will see your plant turning yellow and dying back and wilting and just looking awful sickly looking you'll even see some oftentimes some little potato blight starting in on the leaves and i mean it looks pretty bad the plant but down underneath those tuber skins are sitting and toughening up and they're developing the skin and they're basically about ready to harvest so during this stage five when you see this yellowing starting on your plants you want to stop watering completely don't give them any more water because you don't want to saturate the ground under here while these things are trying to set skin and make keeping them too soft they're soft enough as it is but by adding more water to it just makes them real soft and then when you're trying to harvest them and handle them and you end up ripping the skin back you got to be kind of careful with them but this that's about it for stage five it's very visible when it's in that stage you know what's happening underneath now and those those taters are getting big and they're probably not they're not going to get any bigger than they are at this point they've they've reached their maximal size and all they're really doing right now is focusing on putting on the skins getting the skin set so you don't want to leave them in here too long once it gets like this you want to go ahead and get them on out because some bad things could happen you know you could get heavy rains cause them to rot you know voles and moles and things like that can get in them you just don't want to risk losing your crop too long so at this point you could even pull up a couple and check them and if they're suiting you then go ahead and harvest the whole crop so anyway let's head on out to the garden and take a look at the raised bed i want to show you these uh plants at this stage five where mine are right now and they got a little bit more to go so um i'm gonna let them roll so let's head on out there and let's take a look at stage five well here we are at the raised bed for the re norland red taters and they are doing really pretty good to be in stage five if you look down the row you can see that the plants are really in decline they're in the late you know late stage five now and they are pretty much ready to go looking up close you can see that they're really um really uh died back so these guys are really ready right now i'm gonna give them a few more days for the simple reason i've got to go and get all the five gallon bucket potatoes out all the little new uh new potatoes the baby reds we want to do that today and i just don't have time to do it all in one day and getting a little old so it takes me a little longer than i than it used to but um me and nancy you'll go over there and take up the the bucket potatoes and you can follow along with us on that but we'll be back in just a few days and we'll come out here and dig these up because really i need to get them up some of the potatoes are actually exposed from the rain washing off the soil off of the hill and once they're exposed like that don't turn green on you so we want to get them out as soon as we can so let's head on over there to the container garden and get them buckets of the new potatoes and get them ready so we can have some for lunch let's head on over well here we are over at the containers with the five-gallon buckets when you get to be 69 years old you have to get your wife to come out and help you with the simplest of tasks at least it's something fun to do right right it's like easter egg hunting yeah the better well anyway we got the these are all the baby reds so we're going to go ahead and just dump them i'm not going to pull out a tarp and try to save the soil i know a lot of people like to do that and it's nothing wrong with it i just don't need to do that anymore down here i have plenty of everything that i need and i just don't simply don't have a place to store it so we throw it on here and it kind of helps our grass grow a little bit so anyway we're just gonna dump the buckets out collect up the little new potatoes and have some for lunch right right let's get to it [Music] so [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] you [Music] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] you [Music] uh [Music] there you go we did 18 buckets of the the norland red baby reds and we had a really beautiful harvest this year um they went a little longer than i probably should have but i've been so busy some days i just can't keep up so any day anyway we got um a really nice harvest we're gonna go put these in the tater tower over in the pantry and we'll be enjoying these for many weeks to come so we'll be back in a few days actually and we'll go and get the rest of these up out of the raised bed which is what we've all been really looking forward to so we'll see you back here in just a few days well welcome back friends boy it's sure been a busy week around here we had tons of garlic we had to harvest and elephant garlic and um all the the baby reds that we just did just a couple days ago so we're pretty tuckered out old people tire easily but uh today it's only been a couple of days since we did the uh bucket potatoes together we had a marvelous harvest out of that that we're gonna make some nice meals out of and give away to some folks and today you know we're going to go ahead and get this row of the raised bed potatoes that we've been working on all this time so today is the big day so we're going to take this big potato rake i got right here i like this long handle on it because it's easy on my back and the way me and nessie uh do this is um she does the hard part and i do the easy part you know it's both hard you do a lot of the hard part well she's gonna pull the plant back off to one side i pry it on the other side we kind of lay it over and then we'll come back and shake all the taters out so you ready to get started ready let's go girl let's start right here [Music] [Music] today [Music] is [Music] uh [Music] uh [Music] is [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] today [Music] is [Music] hey [Music] yes [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] it is [Music] wow several hundred pounds of red nolan potatoes what a blessing thank you lord for this nice harvest of taters and if you don't think this is several hundred pounds try picking up one of these buckets it's pretty heavy but anyway we got a lot to last us for a while and we got plenty to share with our family and friends and those in need nancy's gonna dehydrate some of these and make chips and all kinds of cool stuff with it but we are really happy to have this so this is a beautiful variety that we've enjoyed growing and i hope that you've enjoyed watching this little journey all along the way and maybe you learned a little bit of something if you've got a raised bed or buckets either one of them this is a a really good variety to work with and they're very very productive so we thank you for watching and then me and nancy see you next time we hope that our videos brought a smile to your face and a little peace to your heart buys hands we are fed give us lord our daily bread amen have a blessed day [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Hollis and Nancys Homestead

Views: 1,232,923

Keywords: hollisnancyshomestead, plant potatoes, grow potatoes, complete growing guide, gardening, garden, Garden, gardener, grow, green, planting, growing, soil, seed to harvest, hollis, biggest harvest ever, harvest potatoes, hollis and nancys homestead, hollis and nancys, potatoes seed to harvest, container potatoes, massive harvest potatoes, massive harvest

Id: CFQgdhQcV6U

Length: 91min 20sec (5480 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 02 2023