Potato Growing Tips

With St. Patrick’s Day only a week away, many of you will be getting ready to plant your seed potatoes. In West Virginia, that’s the traditional planting date.
It’s been many years since I’ve grown potatoes. I used to grow good old faithful Kennebec potatoes, large white potatoes, which are good bakers. One year, I tried growing red skinned potatoes, and made a plate of mashed potatoes that my then picky eater son wouldn’t eat. When I wrote about this in a column, a reader shot back something to this effect: “No wonder, he won’t eat them. You can’t make mashed potatoes out of red potatoes.” I was a bad cook and a bad mother, because she was right. After skimming through Wood Prairie Farm’s seed potato catalog, I now know why.
There are a lot more potato varieties than I ever imagined. Wood Prairie sorts potato varieties based on texture, from soft moist to firm dry. The soft, moist potatoes are delicious when sauteed, steamed or covered in cheese, au gratin style. The firm, dry potatoes are best prepared baked, fried or boiled. In between these ends of the texture spectrum are creamy mid-dry potatoes for baking, steaming, and cream soups; mealy dry potatoes for baking, mashing and frying; waxy moist potatoes that hold their shape in soups and stews and are good for potato salad and boiled potatoes; and waxy mid-dry potatoes that are all purpose, good for baking, boiling and potato salad. The red potatoes I was growing were probably waxy moist, the Kennebecs, firm dry.
Potato texture is based on relative moisture and starch. The first characteristic rates the potato’s density to the density of its water content. A low solids potato will be moist, a high solids potato will be dry.
There are also two types of starch in potatoes, Amylose and Amylopectin. A potato high in Amylose will be mealy or floury when cooked. One high in Amylopectin will hold firmly together when cooked.
If you want to try a number of preparation techniques when cooking potatoes, it’s a good idea to plant smaller amounts of different varieties. Wood Prairie Farm (www.woodprairie.com or 1-800-829-9765) offers fifteen varieties of organically grown seed potatoes.
They also offer some tips for growing potatoes organically, to which I’ve added my own:
*When selecting a potato patch, don’t forget to rotate your crops. Don’t plant potatoes where you’ve grown them or another nightshade (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants) the year before.
This helps control disease problems.
*Potatoes love fertility, so incorporate lots of organic material into your soil. If you’re using barnyard manure, it must be fully composted or aged first. Regular spraying of potato plants with liquid seaweed or liquid fish emulsion will promote plant health.
*Warm seed for a day or two or sprout them prior to planting. Cut tubers into blocky pieces containing at least two eyes.
*Plant shallow for fast emergence, about two inches deep for our area. Then hill soil around your plants, two to three times during the season, beginning when plants are four to six inches high. Alternately, you can keep covering the plants with a deep layer of straw, making harvesting easier. If you use straw, be sure you use enough so that no sunlight reaches your growing potato tubers. Sunlight turns the skins green and green skins are toxic.
*Regularly hand pick and control insect pests. Keep a jar of rubbing alcohol or soapy water handy and drop potato beetles in.
*Check your potatoes’ growth every few weeks. You can begin harvesting when tubers reach marble size. If you want to store potatoes after harvest, wait until the green leaved tops are completely dead before digging the tubers. Tubers need a moist, dark cellar that stays between 40 and 50 degrees for successful storage. If you don’t have a suitable storage facility, harvest potatoes regularly through the growing season and enjoy them as a summer treat.
If you’ve never grown potatoes, skip buying a 50 pound bag of seed potatoes, even though they’re relatively inexpensive. Start small. Five pounds of seed potatoes plant about 40 to 50 feet of row, enough to help you decide if potato growing is in your future.