growing fresh delicious purple potatoes is easier than you think
in today's episode we look at growing purple potatoes in your home garden
to start growing purple potatoes we will be starting our potato plants from seed potatoes
these potatoes have been sitting in our pantry and they started sprouting just a little bit and
you can keep them in direct sunlight to check if they've sprouted or you can keep them in ziploc
bags to make sure that they're not rotting and if they're still producing sprouts and not getting
bad or decayed that means you can use them as seed potatoes so our first step is to examine
all our potatoes very carefully and only keep the ones that are nice and fresh and not rotting
so as you can see the one on the left has a little bit of decay we're going to be
leaving that alone and then planting these four seed potatoes to start our potato plants
and you can see here they have already started sprouting and this is a great time to
plant these purple potatoes now we are planting our potatoes in december
the first thing we are adding to our raised bed is bone meal bone meal is an extremely nice
fertilizer for potatoes and all it contains is just bone meal it's high in phosphorus
and your potato plants will grow great if you add bone meal to your soil and potatoes do very
well in both containers and in raised beds in our case we are planting these potatoes in raised beds
so we are going to choose the location to plant our four seed potatoes
and then dig up the area a little bit to loosen up the soil and this soil already contains a lot of
rich organic matter a lot of worm castings so all we do is supplement the soil with some bone meal
we add in a handful of bone meal to each of the planting holes that we dug up
and it's important to mix in this bone meal into the soil that way the bone meal can be
mixed up very well directly in the root area where you will be planting your seed potatoes
now you don't have to go overboard and mixing the bone meal the nutrients will get to the plants
eventually but just mixing it in a little bit helps the bone meal get a little bit more deeper
into the soil where it will be used up by the plant and now we are planting our seed potatoes
all we are doing is digging up a little hole and then putting the
seed potato inside the planting hole you can go deeper the potatoes will still grow very well
and the deeper you plant i have seen that the potatoes grow that much better but we are going
to be adding some compost on the top later as you'll see so we are planting these about
four to six inches deep into the soil which is good enough to start these potato plants
now the best time to plant potatoes in southern california is december because the winter season
allows the seed potatoes to settle down a little bit and when spring sets in it's the
perfect weather for potatoes so mid-december or january are the perfect time to plant
seed potatoes in southern california and depending on when your spring season starts you may want
to plant this a few days earlier at about 28 days since planting you can see that the seed potatoes
have sent out shoots that are growing quite well and if you have not added fertilizer to start with
this is a good time to add some bone meal or some good all-purpose fertilizer to your soil
and at 43 days since planting the plants have grown quite well they're nice lush green the
leaves are doing quite well and at 74 days since planting we are going to be adding some compost
on the top so that we don't leave any potatoes exposed to the air the worst thing you can do
for your potato plants is let the potatoes grow over the soil which results in potatoes that are
not too good to eat and may even be toxic so you do want to cover your potato plants very well
with some kind of compost you can use homemade compost or buy some from your garden center
but make sure that you cover your plants very well and once you've covered your plants you can water
them thoroughly the watering lets the compost settle down on the plants it also helps you remove
any compost that may be sitting on the leaves of the plants and adding this kind of compost on top
will not only provide nutrients to your potato plants but will also encourage root development
which will result in many potatoes being formed at 79 days since planting you can see that the potato
plants have grown quite well the stems are getting thicker the leaves are looking a lot better now
and once again if you haven't added fertilizer yet this is a good time to add some all-purpose
fertilizer or bone meal to your plants at 89 days you can see that the plants have grown
well there's a little bit of rust on the plants on the leaves the dark brown spots and if you
see these you can spray these plants with neem oil to get rid of the rust on the leaves and
neem oil also targets and kills any insects or pests on your potato plants at 137 days since
planting it's now may and we are beginning to harvest our potatoes and these potatoes are
purple in color they're almost black so it's hard to see them in the soil so if you can see these
potatoes in the soil you do have a good eye and you can see these potatoes they look quite good
almost black in color and the purple color on these potatoes is due to the presence of
anthocyanins which are a type of antioxidant just like the ones found in blueberries so they're
extremely healthy for you these purple potatoes in fact are much healthier than the white potatoes
they have a lower glycemic index which means that you can better control your blood sugar by
eating these potatoes instead of the white ones so all in all it's a great option to grow these
potatoes in your home garden because they taste just as good as the white potatoes even better
but they also are healthier than white potatoes now you can see some grubs on our raised beds and
these are because the grubs love to live under the compost the rich organic matter that's here
but don't worry about the grubs you can just discard them and look at the potatoes here
they are just awesome the four plants that we planted are giving us a lot of potatoes
on an average you can get about five to six potatoes per plant and remember we are just
using all the organic matter in the soil to grow these potatoes this soil has a lot of compost a
lot of organic matter a lot of worm castings and all this helps the purple potatoes grow very well
and you can see a lot of earthworms in the soil which is a sign that your soil is very healthy and
once you harvest the potatoes you can wash them now you can leave the dirt on the potatoes if
you want to store them in a cool place but in our case we are going to be consuming these right away
so we are washing these potatoes very well to get rid of the dirt
so that these potatoes can be consumed and here you can see beautiful looking purple potatoes
extremely nice extremely healthy and also very delicious so there we have it folks that was
our episode on growing purple potatoes if you like this video please hit that like button if you like
growing potatoes do put in a comment below and if you have grown purple potatoes in your garden
do let me know which variety you've tried we'll see you again soon happy gardening