How We Plant Potatoes for a Great Yield

good morning everyone we are back in the garden today and we are doing something super exciting we are planting our potato seeds so Eric and I harvested our potatoes last year I believe it was early October and we saved some of those potatoes and we're going to be replanting them now in the spring we're very excited for doing that this year because it was our first time saving our own potato seeds so in the past we haven't had our potatoes make it past the February March mark and we are well into May now so very exciting for us and the way we were able to achieve that is those potatoes when we dug them up we stored them in our root cellar and our root cellar is dark damp and cold so it's the perfect conditions for storing potatoes they go into kind of like a dormant phase and then in the spring we bring them out and we sprout them so these are some of the potatoes that we've been sprouting we took them out of our root cellar probably a few weeks back and it took them a while to break out of that dormancy and start showing little sprouts out of their eyes and once they get to this point we know that they are good to go and they're gonna grow once we put them in the soil if you're looking to start your own potatoes it's a fairly simple process you just have to expose the potatoes themselves to sunlight the sunlight triggers them to send off the sprouts and they'll start growing and turn to a plant the other way they are triggered to is by warmth so we had these down in the root cellar that was really cold all winter and that is why they stayed dormant for so long but that's also the reason that we were able to plant them now that it's May we're gonna go ahead and get started right away we have lots to plant behind me so these are the potatoes that we're gonna be planting today I already have them organized by variety and right now is the perfect time to plant these potatoes I like to plant them when they're sprouts are just that long I don't like to put them in the ground before their eyes sprout just because I want to make sure that they are going to sprout and I also try to avoid them being too long and you can definitely plant potatoes when they're too long like this this is a potato seed we picked up from a nursery earlier in the year and it clearly is further along the process of growing you can totally plant them when they're like this you just gotta have to plant them a little bit deeper in the ground and another thing that's common with planting potatoes is cutting them up so Eric and I have never done that and we've always had fairly good success with the potatoes that's why I'm a little hesitant to stray from our routine but I do see lots of folks cut their procede potatoes and if you're going to do that you want to do it a few days or even a week ahead of time and you pick a potato you know a good sized potato and you cut it either in half or just section it to where you have a few eyes on each piece that you're cutting off if that makes sense I definitely think that's a good way to get more bang for your buck but again we just you know we saved these potatoes and it's really not a big deal we have extras right now so I'm just gonna plant the whole seed and the reason why you want to cut them up ahead of time if you're planting them is you want that area that flesh to heal you want to kind of get dry before you plant it and that's because potatoes themselves are pretty susceptible to rot we've never had that issue I think if you have good draining soil that won't be a problem and of course it also depends on the time of the year you're planting your potatoes so we plant ours in the spring and I've made sure that the ground is not frozen it's not frozen in the rose at least I know that because I could dig all the way down to them and the soil is we have really good draining soil there's a lot of like mulch in it bedding from a lot of the aged manure that we get so really it drains really really well so I'm definitely not worried we're gonna lose these to rot but if you are planting these in like a wet field definitely that could happen and that's why you usually want to wait until your soil is a little bit you know fluffier or dryer or workable is the correct term I have all the potato varieties we're planting laid out I believe we have 11 different kinds we have cow white French fingerling Yukon Gold all red purple Majesty Russian banana German butterball cherry red or cheap tin that has a yellow flesh on the inside but I'm just not sure which variety it is then we have purple viking mountain rose and all blue we're planting about 40-plus potatoes today I'm guessing it's probably about 20 pounds that's usually what we like to grow for us to have enough to last through the winter and even the spring months so right now we still have quite a few potatoes left to eat but my guess is we're gonna go through them in the next month which is awesome because I particularly don't want potatoes midsummer you know when we have salmon and fresh greens and things like that so it's kind of nice to have a period where we don't have the potatoes and we can eat other foods and you may be wondering why we grow so many different varieties of potatoes it's mainly just for fun I haven't we really like growing different kinds we've probably grown about 40 different kinds in the last few years and we do have a few favorites but for the most part they all have pretty good yields and there are some differences not just in the way they cook but the way they store we found that actually all the varieties stored well this year generally purple potatoes have purple flesh on the inside that's not the case with all of them we have purple Viking that has a white flesh and a purple skin but this is purple Majesty and purple Majesty is off solutely stunning on the inside it's this gorgeous like galaxy color purple on the inside that I love but Eric is not too fond of our colorful potatoes because it doesn't find them as appetizing because they are kind of an odd color so we're growing a lot more of our yellow and gold potatoes this year I'm putting a stronger emphasis on those ones like German butterball and the Yukon Gold so I'm going to go ahead and dig some holes I'm gonna put the potatoes probably six to eight inches down we're doing the holes about twelve inches apart from each other I'm kind of staggering them from the left to the right we have all the hold sides and we're gonna be putting in the potatoes now and I'm just again going about about 6 inches in with them and I just try to have the sprouts facing upwards sometimes the sprout will break off that's not a big deal they will regrow and for us this is about the closest you would want to plant potatoes I'm they can get a little cramped and you won't get as high of a yield that way but we found that this worked pretty well last year and when you dig up the one plant you'll probably find some of the other tubers next to that one or they may kind of mingle a little bit this would be a great candidate for splitting up because it has eyes all over the whole potato so that's a really nice one we're just gonna plant it whole and we got some massive potatoes last year but I personally tried to save the smaller ones we're planting I didn't really want to plant a whole big potato like this I don't know if it makes much of a difference I would think a bigger potato would have more energy to produce more potatoes however we like to eat the big ones so I just saved the smaller ones for planting so we are finishing with 44 potatoes total so at this point we have two options we can cover up the potatoes as is or we can add some fertilizer and I'm going to add fertilizer I like to use bone meal or fish bone meal is what I have today and if you're familiar with NPK bone meal is higher in phosphorus so that's the middle number and we've just found that our potatoes yield really good when we put that on I've never tried it without it so I'm hesitant to stray from what has worked for us again like planting the whole seed potato we've just always done that so I'm gonna keep doing what we've always done and I'm gonna fertilize them with a little bit of bone meal sometimes I hear from folks they tried to grow potatoes and they had a really poor yield I would pretty much relate that back to the soil the health of the soil and or did you fertilize them I'm if you have really good soil I think we do it has lots of you know aged animal manure in it it has lots of nutrients then we really don't probably need the fertilizer but if you find that you grew potatoes and you just didn't weren't really happy with the yield or didn't really get very much try some bone meal or fish bone meal I'm gonna go ahead and put some on all of the potatoes and then get them covered up I'm also gonna put just a tiny bit of all-purpose fertilizer on this row and lastly I'm putting a little bit of the mycorrhizae and ocula now I'm just gonna cover them up so these potato sprouts should probably break the soil surface and maybe a week to two weeks and we will let them grow the way they typically do but we are going to heal them and I like to mention that I know not everyone Hills potatoes it is thought if you held them you'll get more potatoes because you have more length of the plant underneath soil and therefore it can generate more tubers and we've always done it and I think it does work so once they are a certain height we're gonna come along with straw and soil I like to use both and just kind of Hill it up around those leaves and we'll show you guys that later in the season Before we jump onto the next project let's talk about yield and yield for potatoes it does vary depending upon your soil of course and how loose it is so the list of the soil is better potatoes prefer that kind of soil it also depends on all the nutrients available in your soil but for the most part each potato that you plant is going to give you 10 potatoes back and we generally get that is sometimes we get more closer to the 15 mark so that's a pretty good trade-off one potato turns into 10 to 15 however if you're planting fingerling varieties which are the kind that are a little bit smaller and longer is kind of a little narrower we have Russian banana and French fingerlings those give you a lot more and I highly recommend those especially if you have a small space they tend to be late season so they do take a long time to make their potatoes but you really get more for the amount of potatoes that you plant so we have found just one fingerling can give you anywhere from like 50 to like 70 on the higher end we've had some plants give us 70 or more potatoes from one fingerling potato which is crazy I don't even know if that's a normal thing but we have found that those are really awesome they're great for storage great for cooking and they tend to grow a little bit bigger at least I found our stew last year we had fingerlings end up like this big I don't know if that's normal but I always recommend those for people if you're just starting to grow potatoes okay so we're all done I'm gonna grab some seed and we're gonna hop over to the next round okay so we are moving on to more root crops it is raining a little bit today so I have our seed packets in the Ziploc we're going to be planting radishes beets carrots turnips parsnips and salsify and salsify is new first this year so I'm excited about that one as far as varieties we have a whole bunch of them but two that we really like is the candy striped beets so we always grow candy start beets they're the ones with the pink and white they're sweet but they're also mild - they don't have a real strong beet flavor so that's one of Eric's favorite beets and then we're so growing chaton a red cord carrot this one was outstanding last year and we grew a few different kinds that we really liked but I would highly recommend this one this is from Denali Seco but you couldn't find this carrot through many companies so we're going to go ahead and get started [Music] [Music] all right the last seeds have been sown we just finished up with our radishes we planted the beets the parsnips carrots salsify and some turnips behind me and I put a light amount of an all-purpose fertilizer on everything that we sowed today at this point we have almost finished all of the outdoor planting I do have to get some squash in a few rows behind me but that's not going to be for a little while until we get some warmer weather you can tell it's raining now and I am gonna water the radishes in but I do think that we're gonna have rain for the next few days so that's really gonna help us get a head start carrot seeds have to stay pretty moist for two weeks until they germinate so I'm looking forward to the rain helping us out with that I'm gonna go ahead and finish up out here and thank you guys again for watching we hope you tune in for more summer gardening videos

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 912,429

Rating: 4.8978291 out of 5

Keywords: garden tour alaska, garden tour, raised rows, homestead alaska, high tunnel greenhouse, hoop house alaska, greenhouse alaska, off grid cabin, off grid life, living in alaska, off grid living, gardening cold climate, summer in alaska, hilling potatoes, growing potatoes, how to grow potatoes, planting potato seed, potato tubers, planting potatoes, fertilizing potatoes, planting seed potatoes, sprouting potatoes, storing potatoes, root cellar potatoes, chitting potatoes

Id: t_DwM91jGKY

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020