Friday, May 1, 2009

Potatoes!

Kind of like hunting for Easter eggs in dirt, or bobbing for apples in dirt, or finding buried treasure (in dirt) or....you get the picture. For folks with little (aka no) knowledge of how to grow potatoes, we haven't done too bad.


Tho the plants have gone from lush.....


 ...to dying in the last week as a result of - weather/disease/insects?   


We won't get nearly the crop that we thought we would.  I've already pulled up several plants that had died with loads of little (marble sized) tots on the roots.  I think we will be doing some research as to what went wrong before we plant again next fall.  And I definitely won't be doing the straw thing again.  I'd rather just dig in the dirt :)


  

For the record....the straw was how we decided to 'hill up' our potatos.  Pototoes grow up from the original spud along the trunk of the plant and have to be covered as the plants grow as light causes the spuds to turn green and become toxic.  Many people recommended planting shallow and using straw to mound over the plants as they grow.  By using straw (so the theory goes) you don't have to dig in the dirt to get to the potatoes.  But we found NO potatoes growing in the straw, just a few (tho very nice) in the dirt.   Not sure why it doesn't work for us but it was messy and kind of a pain anyway, so we will try another method next year.

3 comments:

Mandy said...

this is very interesting, my husband was wondering about growing potatoes!! the ones you have look great!!

MAYBELLINE said...

Thanks for commenting on my blog. I'm having the same trouble with my potatoes. Planted in February and I had lovely greens until I mounded. Then, the disease came on following the mounding and the heat. I haven't harvested yet.

Do you have any suggestions what crop should follow potatoes?

Maureen said...

I lost my crop rotation book so I'm not really sure. I'm thinking beans would be fine, but I'm planting peanuts in my beds (yet another experiment :)

I think next year I'm going a lot easier on the mounding. I will say that on the ones I didn't mound several potatoes grew up above the dirt and did turn green. Funny thing tho, as soon as I covered those up they got ugly also. I'm not sure what's going on here but I'm going to do some research (aka ASK alot of questions) before I plant next year.

Hopefully, even tho yours don't look so healthy, you'll get plenty of potatoes. Even tho our plants looked horrible and I did pull them up early, we got quite a few nice tasty tots.