Growing Potatoes From Start to Finish

Despite living in the south which is riddled with heat, humidity and lovely bugs, I'm determined to grow our own potatoes!! Another factor which complicates us growing potatoes is that we do not have a root cellar, basement, or crawl space; which makes storing potatoes long term nearly impossible. And as some folks do in the northern states, leaving the potatoes in the ground until we want to eat them is just not a method that would work for us: first because we need the space to plant other crops and second because the bugs would devour them before we could eat them all. We've tried many different methods for storing them over the years, but you'll have to keep reading to find out what we did with our crop of potatoes this year!

Growing potatoes really isn't that hard it just takes a long time for them to grow. We start with freshly tilled soil (with fertilizer tilled in if you're using) and a bag of seed potatoes. The kids and I took the seed potatoes and cut them into sections, cutting off parts so that each cut had an 'eye' (which is the part that leads to a potato plant). Then we dug a long trench, dropping potato chunks into the trench spacing them about a foot apart. After that you cover the trench back with dirt. As the potatoes grow you continue to cover them with dirt. Potatoes love light airy soil.

Once you start to notice the plants turning brown (dying) it's time to harvest your crop of potatoes. You want to be careful digging up your potatoes, because they're basically long vines under ground and it's easy to chop one in half or at the very least cut a potato you didn't want to cut. We lay our potatoes out on a tarp to dry out a little. Any green, mushy, or potatoes with evidence of bug bites we throw out.

This year we decided to further dry out the potatoes by setting them on tables lined with newspaper in our schoolroom. I'm not sure we'll do this method in the future as it did seem that we lost a good many to rot, but I'm not sure if we wouldn't have lost them anyways. After letting them dry out for 2 weeks; turning them after one week, we wrapped the remaining good potatoes individually in newspaper and stored them in an under-the-bed tote without the lid. We stacked the potatoes two layers high, and stored them under our bed. This is the first year we've done this so I'll keep you posted on how long they last.

Since potatoes cost a good bit when bought at our local grocery I don't purchase them all too often. So when our potato harvest comes in we typically eat them up fairly quickly. I wish there was a way we could grow a years worth and store them to last nearly as long, but that just isn't in the cards right now.

Oh I should add that any potatoes smaller than a baseball we canned to add to soups, stews, and to make mashed potatoes. Canning potatoes isn't hard it's just labor intensive! Thankfully, though our whole crew gets their hands into the mix to get the job done, and as they say "many hands make light work". I didn't get any pictures from when we canned our potato harvest, which is totally not like me, but I must have been seriously in the zone, lol!

While our potato preserving system may not be ideal, it works for us and we get to enjoy farm fresh potatoes grown by our hands! Trust me it's well worth all the extra work!!

With Love & Hope,
Jennifer