growing fresh and delicious potatoes in your garden is not only easy but also
very rewarding and today's episode we look at growing Yukon Gold potatoes in
your home garden now we are growing our potatoes from seed potatoes that you can
find in your local gardening stores and December to January is a good time to
start planting potatoes you can wait as long as January to February in Southern
California and that's because potatoes grow really well in the spring season
and do not like heat a lot they like warm weather but not extremely hot
weather so we are growing our potatoes in our raised beds and as you can see we
have arranged these seed potatoes at the place that we will be planting them and
you can see the distance is approximately 8 to 10 inches from each
other and we are digging a trench this is one of the methods I've tried a
couple of times now and they've wielded good results so what you do is you dig a
trench just like you see with a shovel make sure that you dig deep enough I am
digging about eight to ten inches here and I'm digging almost till my potato is
planted close to the native soil very close to the native soil and it doesn't
matter because most of the potatoes will grow around it and your raised bed soil
which is nice and loose will help you grow great potatoes
now the Yukon Gold potato is one of my favorite ones it's extremely delicious
and I've loved growing this potato variety with a few exceptions which we
will see there are some challenges to growing this potato but what we are
doing is we are digging these trenches and then placing each of these potatoes
into this trench which will help the potato grow very well inside the trench
and you do not need to cover the trench completely while you're growing these as
the plant grows you will be slowly covering this trench with additional
soil and you will see that that's one of the best ways you can grow your potatoes
now as far as soil goes we have a mix of peat moss compost and perlite in the
soil and a lot of organic matter in fact this was one of the raised beds that had
a ton of organic matter from our last two growing seasons you can see that the
soil is not only very nice and soft but there are also a lot of earthworms in
the soil which aerate the soil and make it a perfect environment for growing
crops like potatoes
now do keep in mind that plants like potatoes sometimes have problems growing
in soils with lots of compost and we'll see if that's a factor here but certain
potato varieties get fungal diseases when they grow in too much compost in
this case however we have split our soil into peat moss compost and perlite which
means if we have a good mix of soil now potatoes must be grown under full
Sun which means six to eight hours of Sun as you can see the trees around this
potato planter are actually shading this raised bed however we still get a lot of
sunlight especially between noon and the evening which is a strong sunlight and
as long as you're getting strong sunlight a few hours of strong sunlight
that's a good spot to grow your potatoes now once you've planted all the spuds
all you do is water your raised bed and remember that we have a lot of organic
matter in this raised bed so I did not add a lot of extra fertilizer when
growing these potatoes but if you don't have enough organic
material or if your soil is deficient I would highly recommend adding an
all-purpose fertilizer while you are planting your potatoes an organic
fertilizer is better for potatoes just because it contains a lot of potash and
other useful ingredients that potatoes love
now in about 51 days you will see that the plants have now grown and don't be
surprised if your plants take too long to grow because they will adapt to the
conditions if it's too cold they will probably wait till the shoots show up
and 83 days since planting you can see that the plants have grown quite well
the leaves are nice and dense at this time you might start seeing some flowers
which is perfectly normal potato plants do flower and flowering is actually an
indication that the plants are growing well and flowering usually occurs late
into the growing season so as long as your plants are healthy like you see
here till they produce flowers then you're okay and remember that these
plants are grown in full Sun they love sunlight and at this stage if your
plants are not showing signs of good health go ahead and add a liquid
fertilizer, an organic liquid fertilizer which contains all the essential
nutrients which is nitrogen phosphorus and potassium
now as you can see here this Yukon Gold potato variety is affected by this
problem called blight and what happens is the leaves start getting discolored
and although this doesn't affect potatoes that grow in containers and
some other potatoes I've seen that the Yukon Gold potato in particular is very
susceptible to blight where the leaf just turns brown and then it starts
getting discolored and you can see that it'll start affecting the leaves first
and then go on to the stems but as soon as you see this on the leaf go ahead and
remove all these leaves what you want to do is as soon as you see signs of any
kind of fungal disease like rust or blight you want to remove the leaves as
soon as you can now I waited a little longer than I would have liked but I did
go ahead and remove all the leaves
and now it's harvest time you can see that the foliage has almost died and you
can either wait till this long or you can make sure that the flowers have come
and then the leaves are dying a little bit at least before you start harvesting
now to harvest I use a garden fork it really helps me harvest potatoes very
easily we are beginning to harvest this first
plant now and you don't have to harvest all the plants in one go you can always
harvest one plant after the other so we will go ahead and harvest this one
potato plant and show you how the potatoes look like
and once again these are the Yukon Gold potatoes absolutely delicious potatoes
absolutely buttery if you think you like Yukon Gold potatoes please put a comment
in the comments box below
and we will now go ahead and harvest the rest of the potatoes since these are
growing in a raised bed it does involve turning up a lot of soil and remember
that we planted these potato plants in trenches which means that we have to
remove a lot of soil to get to the potatoes but the potatoes will grow all
around the soil the base of the plant and as you can see here we are
harvesting a lot of potatoes and this is my son he's helping me harvest the
potatoes and kids absolutely love gardening involve them in gardening they
really have a great time it teaches them to be outdoors away from all the
distractions you want them to be away from and really teaches them patience
and watching things grow and just the whole joy of gardening it's amazing
and while we are harvesting these potatoes let's talk a little bit about
watering now potato plants do like to be well watered they do not like to dry out
but at the same time you have to be very careful of over watering now it's easy
to overwater if your soil is not well draining but as you can see here our
soil is so well draining you can even see some other terms as we are
harvesting the potatoes the watering becomes less of a problem as long as the
soil stays moist the plants will get enough water
now during winters it becomes a little challenging because we do not usually
like to go out and check the plants and water them and that's why I recommend
setting up a drip irrigation system or a micro spray system where you can set up
a timer and then make sure that your plants are well watered and just make
sure that the soil is wet about two or three inches below the surface and as
long as you're doing that your potatoes will grow great
and this is our harvest looks like as you can see it looks beautiful and you
can either store them with the dirt on in our case we are going to be using
these potatoes right away so you've washed them clean and after
washing them you can see they look amazing these are the Yukon Gold
potatoes and they look quite good and one of the best-tasting potatoes in my
opinion
and we continue to harvest the other potatoes as well there are a lot of
potatoes we grew about nine or ten plants I think in this raised bed and we
got a lot of large potatoes from the harvest now as far as insects and
diseases go you might see some critters chewing on the leaves of the plant and
making a few holes in the leaves which is okay but if you want to control them
you can use neem oil just spray neem oil or soapy water on the plants and they
should be controlled and there are some other insects that do affect the potato
plant but in general I do not use any insecticides or pesticides in my garden
so if at all I see a lot of damage I might just use neem oil but in general I
just leave the plants as is and for controlling fungal diseases like blight
you can go with things like a copper spray or sulfur however I stay away from
all these as well I do not like to add any insecticides or fungicides in my
garden except for natural products like neem oil and with organic gardening
you do want to stay away from a lot of these products so make sure that you're
using products judiciously and you're cognizant about what products you are
using and homegrown potatoes are still amazing no matter how much yield you get
from these plants they're fresh they're grown organically they taste better than
any of the potatoes you can buy from the grocery store and this is our big
harvest looks like it looks amazing and you can keep the dirt on if you want to
store these potatoes if you're planning to use some of these potatoes and give
some away to family and friends so if you see these potatoes they are quite
good-sized and let's do a quick weight check remember this doesn't include the
couple of harvests we did earlier but it does include all the other potatoes that
we just harvested and we've grown about eight to nine plants and although we had
some plants that were affected by some of the fungal diseases on the leaves we
still got a decent harvest and remember that if your leaves are discolored or
they're not doing well or they look diseased it doesn't mean that your
potatoes will also not be fine you might get perfectly fine potatoes even if your
leaves are diseased or not working so good so don't worry too much
about controlling insects and diseases on your plant but focus more on the
nutrition and the soil that you have and as you can see we got almost 13 pounds
of potatoes from just a small area which is a pretty good harvest so if you
haven't grown potatoes I highly recommend that you start growing
potatoes in your home garden so there we have it folks that was our episode on
growing the Yukon Gold potatoes in raised beds if you grow potatoes please
put them in the comments box below if you have a favorite potato variety put
them in the comments box below as well we'll see you again soon happy gardening