I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Today we're going to talk about potatoes.
Potatoes are a staple in the American diet and they're actually pretty easy to grow in
most soils.
They prefer to have a little bit acid soils, pH of around six, and ours here in the southeastern
part of Utah are closer to seven-two to seven-five, maybe even a little bit higher.
But they still do quite well, you add some good organic matter to your soils, and potatoes
will do quite well.
What you need to do to grow potatoes - what you need to get your potato sets prepared
- and really, the only tools that you need is a shovel, and then later in the season
when they're growing, a hoe so that you can hill them up.
Potatoes are actually a stem, they're a modified stem - we call them a tuber.
And so what I'm going to first here is...is do a close up quick and show you how to cut
your potato set so that we know that we've got it ready to go and we can get some good
plants growing out of it.
Now seed potatoes are not seeds at all, of course, they're...it's a vegetative propagation
method, and on the potatoes you'll notice that they're starting to sprout - this is
a good indicator.
I suppose technically you could get potatoes from the grocery store and plant those, although
it's never recommended.
First of all they're treated to kind of burn off those sprouts so that they don't sprout
quite as readily.
And also you may be propagating some diseases or something like that, so it's a good idea
to buy certified seed from a garden store.
So when we cut these potato sets up we can get three or four sets out of one potato.
Notice that we have these eyes; we want to make sure that these eyes, we have at least
one or two eyes on each set.
So we'll cut that up, we've got a couple eyes on that one there, we've got couple more on
that one there, and another slice like that.
So the potato - the growing point is right here at the eye, you get some energy from
the potato part here, will give you energy for that so it can get going.
You really don't have to water potatoes up, that's kind of a nice thing about them, even
here in our dry country we can wait for these sprouts to pop up out of the ground before
we worry about getting water onto them.
So we'll get some of these potatoes planted and we'll have some more fun here.
The potato sets, it's good idea if after you cut them you let them sit for a day, they
kind of callous over, you don't have to but they're more likely to be a little bit more
successful.
But they're really quite simple: you want to dig down about four, six inches, set your
set down there, and plant it.
Within the row, plant your plants about 12 inches apart.
The distance between the rows...about 32 inches is probably the most efficient.
A lot of the farmers do it at 30 inches because it fits their equipment quite well, fits the
mules or whatever.
So between your rows you go anywhere from 30 to 36 inches, within the rows about 12
inches is good.
You can plant more than one set to a hill...but I've had just as good success with just one
- one potato set to the hill.
I kind of like to try to turn the set so the sprouts will be coming straight up as opposed
to turning them upside down so that then they'd have to kind of grow out and then back up.
Since the...the tuber is a stem, after it's growing, we want to cover those stems so that
they'll form the potatoes, so we're going to create a hill, eventually, throughout the
growing season.
We'll get a...a hill going along there and it'll form those tubers up in the hill.
So we get our potatoes planted, a good time for planting potatoes here in the high desert
country of Utah is early May.
A...a year when you got a really early season you might do a little bit earlier, but that's
a pretty good time.
Start - plant them in the early May.
Now the big question is of course, when do I know when to start digging the potatoes?
You'll notice that the potatoes will set up a - send up a flower, and then they'll have
a little...a little fruit, almost a kind of a miniature tomato - they're related to the
tomatoes - they got a miniature fruit on there, and when those fruits fall off, that's usually
about the time that you can expect to have some tubers in the ground.
You'll also notice that the ground will kinda start to crack, because the tubers are growing
underneath, so they'll kinda crack and swell.
You can always - if you plant enough - you can always do a test dig about mid to late
July and see what you've got going; you should have some tubers forming - depending on the
variety.
The russets tend to form the tubers a little bit slower, the...red pontiacs and some of
these others may form just a little bit earlier, the Yukon gold, and some of those will probably
form their tubers a little bit earlier, so you can have a little bit earlier potatoes
with those.
So that's kind of how you tell when to harvest those.
And now, we got some potatoes, we're ready to plant our garden.