well folks you know what they say there's a first time for everything
and this year planting fall potatoes is definitely a first for us no I'd never
heard of anybody in the South growing potatoes in the fall but in talking to
our tater man over at Irish eyes he highly recommended it and said we should
easily be able to get a good crop potatoes off in the fall now I'm still a
little warm here the highs during the day around 90 or so
but it should start getting cooler pretty soon which is what these potatoes
will prefer now the variety we're growing this fall is a Yukon Gold and
we've tried these before and had good success with them so we're hoping for
good results this fall now the problem is the seed potato producers don't
usually have any potatoes available this time of year towards the end of August
so what we had to do is we had to buy these a couple months ago and just put
them in the fridge and let them sit there until we got ready to plant them
because when we received these potatoes a lot of them had buds on them already a
half inch or inch long so we didn't want those to keep growing so we put them in
the fridge just kind of stunt their growth we can pull them out and cut them
up plant them when we're ready now I've seen some people will plant the whole
potato but we've always cut up our potatoes and the main reason behind that
is we didn't just make them go further we can get more out of a bag of taters
if we cut them up and the second reason we cut our potatoes is to grow bigger
potatoes now if you look on your seed potatoes you'll see the eyes or buds
there where that potatoes starting to sprout and the more of those that you
plant in a specific spot the more potatoes you're going to get but if you
have too many eyes in that spot you're going to end up with a lot of small
potatoes now the fewer eyes you plant in that
spot you're going to get fewer potatoes but you're going to get bigger potatoes
and with these Yukon Golds we're aiming to get bigger potatoes so for us it's
the easy decision to get more rows of potatoes and to grow bigger potatoes by
cutting these guys and reducing the number of eyes we have
in a specific spot now let's talk about actually planting the potatoes so I
played around with some potato row spacing in the past and I've tried to
plant potato rows as close as two foot together what happens when you get the
potato rows to close is there's not enough available dirt between the rows
that throw up on the potatoes and hill them as they grow so from my experience
just three foot is about as narrow as you want to go and your distance between
your potato rows now you can certainly go wider than that and plant them four
or five foot or even more apart if you've got the space but I'm a little
tight on space this fall and so these right here we're planted on three-foot
rows the first thing we want to do to plant our potatoes is we want to mark
off our rows and then we want to make a furrow to plant those potatoes in now I
used to use a string to lay off my rows to get them absolutely perfectly
straight but the older I get the less I care if my rows are a little bit crooked
so I just put a stick at the end each row and just drive to it and get as
straight as I can that way so I use my double wheel hoe when my plow set on
there in the furrow in position to run along there and make my trenches or my
furrows that I'm gonna plant my potatoes in then I took my pieces of seed potato
and I place them along that furrow about every eight inches now we don't have to
be really exact with this just kind of ballpark it but about on average eight
inches apart and after I've laid those potatoes in the fir then all we got to
do is come behind there and cover them up make a little hill on top of those
potatoes sitting in that furrow so for that I use my higher arch wheel hoe and
I had the plow set put in the healing position so I can run along there
straddle those potatoes and cover them up as I run along the road now you can
certainly use the double wheel hoe for the furrow wing portion and the
healing portion of planning the potatoes or you could use the higher arch for
both the furrowing and healing portions this is just what I had set up currently
so it was easier just to grab the double wheel hoe it was already set up in the
furling position and then after that grabbed the high arch which was already
set up in the healing position now if you've seen some of our
other videos you know that we like to plant almost everything in our garden on
the drip tape but potatoes are one of those things that I don't plan on drip
tape anymore I've experimented with this both ways and the years where I use drip
tape I feel like the dirt just got a little too wet I didn't get as good of
production and I had a little bit of a rotting issue with some of the potatoes
because the soil was too wet so the last few times I've grown potatoes I hat and
put drip on them and I've kept that soil down they're a little more dry and I've
gotten better results so if your climate allows definitely give fall potatoes to
trial we're really excited to try it this year and we think it's going to
turn out really good for us if you're interested in any other products shown
in this video we'll have a link in the description there where you can take a
look at those thanks for watching