It's one of the world's most important food crops. It's incredibly productive, and in Solano County it can grow almost year-round with some frost protection. In the home garden it's insanely easy to grow—with the right conditions it's pretty much effortless.
It's the potato. Here I'll describe how you can grow it in your backyard without any digging for huge harvests.
But first, I have to mention it's probably not worth it to grow potatoes at home. In any grocery store you can buy russets, red potatoes and Yukon Gold's for far less than the cost of seed potatoes. In the store you can buy a five-pound bag of russet potatoes for less than $3 while one pound of russet seed potatoes will cost you about $20, and you'll have to wait four months or so to get 10 pounds of harvested potatoes.
But can you buy a Pinto Gold in the store? Can you buy a Magic Molly? No, you can't. You also can't buy a Tam Dew honeydew or a Crane Melon. I grow those, too. If we're limited to only what's at the store, we miss out on everything else that's possible.
While the experience possible with a potato grown at home isn't quite as life-changing as, say, a melon (which can be not far short of enlightenment), I had enough enjoyment from growing Harlequin potatoes that I'll grow them again this year and have also added a couple new varieties to try.
Potato Housekeeping
Seed potatoes are really just potatoes that are sold for the purpose of being planted to multiply into more potatoes. Sure, you can jam a store-bought potato into the ground, but you're gambling on what kind of yields you'll get and how much disease you're putting into your soil. Certified seed potatoes are easy to find onlinewith a simple search. Companies that sell them include Territorial Seed, Sow True Seed and many others.
Disease can quickly build up across generations of potatoes because they're reproduced from tuber to tuber. These diseases build and build, and they stay behind in the soil after your harvest. Because potatoes are in the Solanum family, those diseases can destroy next year's tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers and any other related crops.
Commercial seed potato producers grow new tubers from tissue cultures of older tubers and other methods that minimize how much disease squeaks through to the next generation. This is not something that's plausible for most of us to do at home, so we're best of buying new certified seed potato tubers every year or so. More than that and we risk catastrophe.
Potatoes do grow from seeds, which transmit only a negligible amount of pathogens from the parent plant, but as potato plants they are so genetically diverse that what are called “True Potato Seeds” or TPS, are unlikely to produce tubers that look or taste anything like the one they came from. You can learn everything you need to know about TPS from Cultivariable.
As far as crop rotation, potatoes are in the nightshade family with tomatoes and peppers and share the same diseases and pests. If you plant the same family in the same spot year after year, you're increasing the chances of a catastrophic season. According toUCIPM, research is lacking about how many years tomatoes, a potato cousin, can be planted in the same spot. TheUniversity of Wisconsinrecommends we do not plant an area with the same family more than once every three to four years.
Growing Potatoes an Easy Way
Let's assume you've already decided to try to grow potatoes and want jump right in. But let's also assume that you're like me and don't really want to dig to plant or harvest them.
Commercial potato growers use a tractor and heavy equipment to plant them into trenches and cover them deeply. The main reason to plant into trenches and then “hill them up” is to make sure that no new potato tubers are exposed to sunlight that will make turn them green and toxic to eat. If you have a potato on the counter and it's begun to turn green, that potato is done. Throw it in the trash. The poison is through the whole tuber, not just the green part. Go get some new potatoes to eat. As I mentioned, they don't cost much.
Fortunately, trenching and hilling are not necessary to avoid poisonous potatoes. When I go out to harvest my potatoes, I prefer to pick them up off the ground, rinse them off, then throw them straight into the pot. Last spring, this was pretty close to how it went with a no-dig, deep-mulch method.
The method is simple. First, cut any of your certified seed potatoes with more than two eyes into pieces. Then leave the cut pieces out in the open air (shade or indoors is best) for a day to scar over.
When it is time to plant, place each piece of seed tuber cut-side down into the soil beside a source of water, irrigation emitter or a space you plan to hand-water at least weekly. If you're concerned about fertility, add a balanced organic fertilizer.
Then cover over with compost and a deep (8 inches or more) straw or alfalfa mulch or really any deep mulch that will be easy to shove aside when it's time to harvest.
First-year Deep Mulch Harvest
For me last year, this no-dig, deep-mulch method kind of worked. It worked in the sense that I got a whole lot of potatoes. All together, the plants probably produced 10x the amount of seed potatoes I planted.
The downside was that I didn't follow the method perfectly. I thought that it would be enough to cover the seed potatoes only with the deep straw mulch. It turns out that without a complete cover of compost or other way to hide the surface of the potato I ended up losing about one-third of my harvest to earwigs and pill bugs that ate unsightly holes into my new tubers.
But even so, I ate a whole lot of great potatoes. The better of the two varieties was Harlequin, and I'm happy I saved some tubers to replant because I can't remember the original source and I'm unable to find the variety online this year.
Starting Over Earlier than Planned
As an epilogue, that fall, the seed tubers I saved from the summer harvest sprouted in the cupboard. Believing they were pretty much lost for the following spring I planted them in 15-gallon pots beside my deck. They grew into new plants until they were killed by frost a couple months later. This unexpected and actually enormous harvest, considering, are now my seed potatoes for this spring. Miraculously, the Yukon Golds that sprouted in the cupboard are still out there (in April) in the 15-gallon pot doing just fine.
This spring I've added two new varieties, 'Purple Majesty', and 'Purple Viking'. I planted them right on the surface of the soil again, but this time I covered them completely with compost and then the deep alfalfa mulch. Hopefully the earwigs and pill bugs won't have a chance to wreck me this time.
