Potatoes are cheap in the market. So, growing potatoes seems silly unless it is some unusual variety.
This isn’t silly to me. I like growing Yukon gold potatoes. Every year I put in a row, less than a dozen seed potatoes, just to have the pleasure of doing it.
Weather Problems
Potatoes like cool weather, but not frost. They like moist dirt, but not wet. It’s getting hard to have these conditions every spring.
This year started out too cold and the seed potatoes hunkered down to wait. Later the temperatures were cool enough. However, it was very wet, making a couple seed potatoes rot.
Last year frost kept nipping off the potato vines. Other years it stays too cold or too wet or too dry or too hot. I almost gave up growing potatoes and have given up growing more than a few.
Hilling vs. Mulch
Weeds love it when I try to hill potatoes. The last time I tried hilling, the giant ragweed got so big I had to use a saw to cut it down. Needless to add, the potatoes didn’t do well.
Now I use mulch. A standard flake gives the right distance between plants. Two flakes wide is a good width for my single row. Otherwise, a flake is a good distance between rows.
Not all purchased potato varieties do well growing under mulch. Purchased Yukon Gold do well. A way to get around this is to keep your own seed potatoes, choosing those from the plants that grow the best.
Harvesting
Just because the potatoes were grown under mulch, doesn’t mean I can just rake the mulch off and pick up the potatoes. All the mulch does is keep the weeds from taking over and replacing hilling.
When I harvest the potatoes, I push the mulch away from the base of the now brown plant and pull. Then I know where to start exploring in the dirt for the potatoes. They can be anywhere in a foot across circle and up to six inches down.
For me, seeing the row of bushy potato vines and later bringing up those lovely potatoes is all the reason I need to grow a few every year.
