I'm Ron Patterson with Utah State University Extension in Carbon County.
Once you get your potatoes planted you need to do some managing so that you
don't end up with green ends, or green potatoes, they're not good for you and
they're an indication that they've been exposed to the sun. So when we look at
the potatoes, we'll pull this one up here close, and we'll show you a little bit
about the physical characteristics of potatoes and then we'll show you how to
manage them so you don't get green potatoes. As we look at this potato set,
we plant potatoes - we plant pieces of potatoes - we don't plant them by seed we
plant the pieces by the potatoes, and you look at these pieces of potatoes they're
actually a stem - they're called the tuber - but this stem has sprouts coming out
from the potato eyes. Those are buds on the stem. Now these sprouts have come up
and you can see that we have roots coming out here low and we have leaves
starting to form up here up on the stems. The trick is we want to have these
potatoes not turn green so they need to not be exposed to the sun; we need to
cover the potatoes. There are lots of different ways we can do that so we'll
go back out over to the row and talk a little bit more about how to do that. As
the potatoes get up to six to eight inches or so, you want to hill them up
and there are a number of products or methods that you can use to hill those
potatoes. This row on the right has been hilled, the one on the left - these are
planted at the same time, it's the same variety, they got about the same height -
the one on the left has not been hilled. So you want to pull that soil up along
the stems so that we're covering more stem, and another nice benefit is that it
will also help to do a little bit of weeding for you too because you'll cover
up those. And I use drip irrigation in my potatoes so I'll have to move those so
that I don't chop them with my hoe, but I'll show you how I do it. And there's
lots of different ways, you can be creative, you just want to keep those
developing stems down here underground from being exposed to the sunlight. So
the way I hill my potatoes - the potatoes are wanting to grow the stems up and out
a little bit the roots are wanting to grow down - the way I do it I just take my
hoe...do that up along the plant. So it'd take me - in this good ground it
would take me - about...Oh 10 minutes to do... maybe 15 minutes to do both sides of one
row. I'd do it that side and then I go back over here and I'd do it on this
side. That's really quite important to cover these up. I have done potatoes - last
year I didn't have enough time to get them hilled like I should have and I
ended up with a lot of green ends on my potatoes. So you want to use something to
hill those potatoes up so that they are covered as they develop and you don't
develop those green skins on the tubers. So these have been hilled up quite well
here: you can see they're coming up, got pretty good valley pretty good
hill right there, so that's done well. You might think that as the plant fills in
it would cover up those potatoes and that's true right here for a little
while, but then as the plant gets bigger you'll see that those...those vines will
flop over and actually open up. So as the tubers get bigger they will
kind of grow out of the ground right there in the middle so you want to have
this covered up here. Most of the potatoes will develop right close to the
crown right there. Okay so I have these...this row of potatoes is now hilled on both sides. The
farmers have implements they pull behind their tractors and throws the dirt up
onto it, well this is too small the scale to do it that way so I just do it my hoe.
So you just need to cover them with something so that those potatoes won't
develop the green ends. So there you have it: just another way to have fun in your
garden.