Larry, your soil is such a funny color:P Our native soil was tannish on top and very red down a few inches. After years of compost/chicken litter it is now a nice brown.

When my soil dries out it is much lighter, sort of a tannish gray. My native soil does not look like this, its more of a tannish red. This is the 6Th year for the garden you are looking at. It has had everything but the kitchen sink tilled into it. The soil does have a high mineral count.

This soil is very shallow. Down a few inches it is hard-pan, it wont even perk test. I just try to improve the top and hope for the best. You can see the ditch that I have dug around the garden to help it drain, when it is wet, it is very wet, when it is dry you cant hardly drive a nail in it. My step dad says "its the kind of ground you have to plow between 12:00 and 1:00 o'clock, if you try to plow it before 12:00 its too wet, if you wait till after 1:00 its too dry".

Larry

Larry,

Maybe we can work out a trade. When the guy came to do the perc test for our septic system, he dug the hole while explaining he would fill it with water and come back 24 hours later to measure how much water was still in the hole. After filling it, he went to the car to get his notebook. By the time he came back from the street, the hole had drained empty, and needless to say, we passed, no need for a second trip. However, that kind of sand isn't exactly easy to garden in.

Seedmama mine may not be as fast as draining as yours but I don't have to worry about standing water or having to wait long to get in the garden to work. After a 1-2 inch rain I can work in the garden by 10. Really mine is close to perfect. And all I've added over 18 years has helped it. It has a lot darker color down to about 12 inches than it did before and any of the non improved soil around it. Jay

I am working on another spot, its what I call my "South Garden". The soil is not much better but it is the highest point in my lawn. Its an eye sore because its out front nest to the highway. I figure that if people dont like it they can just keep their eys on the road and keep going.

Larry

Larry, I feel the same way. I have to put containers in my side yard every year in search of sunshine. In my neighborhood, the houses are sort of back to back anyway, so someone has to look at it.

My big garden sits between the house, which is 300' back from the road, and the roadway and if anyone doesn't like looking at the garden as they drive by, then they can just keep their eyes on the roadway. : ) I put the garden there because that's where the soil had the least clay content, and it still has plenty of clay, but less than the land out back.

Rally, though, I have met lots of people because of the garden. They stop and ask if they can look at the garden, compliment me on it, ask questions about putting in a garden, etc. I've made lots of new friends just because the garden gave them an excuse to stop and introduce themselves. I know that some of them are gardeners themselves because sometimes I come home and find a watermelon or cantaloupe or something sitting by my garden gate, and it isn't from my garden but rather from the garden of a fellow gardener who just wanted to share their harvest.

I hope to start digging trenches this afternoon so I can get the potatoes planted tomorrow. All the strong winds this week have dried up the top few inches of soil in the garden and almost all the standing puddles of water are gone. With rain in the forecast for next week, I think Sunday and Monday are my best chance of getting anything done before more rain falls from the sky.

It is very cold and frosty here this morning. If I were to hurry up and get moving, I could get out to the garden and remove the puddles in the pathway by breaking up the ice and carrying them out of the garden in a bucket!

Bought my seed potatoes a few days ago--Kennebic, Red Pontiac and Royal Gold. Will cut them this evening. Next week will look in Tahlequah for the blue potatoes I raised next year. The grandkids thought they were cool.

I did not expect it to get as cold last night as it did. I did not cover my potatoes with soil when I planted them, I just tossed on a thin covering of shredded leaves to shield the sprouts from the sun and frost, I hope I gave then enough cover. I will go out and cover with a little soil/compost today. The soil did dry out a lot more by leaving the trench open.

I really need to get more soil ready to plant, but If I cant get rid of the deer it will be a big waste of time. I don't like any type of fence but it will be a must to have one this year.

Larry

Dorothy,

I saw Adirondack Blue seed potatoes in Lowe's this week, so you might check the Lowe's closest to you to see if they have them there yet. I've grown Adirondack Blue and All-Blue and found that Adirondack Blue produced better for us and had better flavor too.

Dawn

I saw some blue potatoes in a local Wal Mart last weekend. Not sure what they were. I have more of the Tom Wagner tubers than I can plant so try not to stop and tempt myself to buy anymore. And the Wagner potatoes are the best I've ever grown. Shared some with George and will be anxious to hear his reviews. Jay

I planted chitted potatoes early this morning of the following varieties brought from Atwoods; Kennebeck White, Norkotah Russet, Pontiac Red, Yukon Gold, Dakota Pearls, and Purple Majesty from Lowe's. I planted in 6" part in three rows in 4ft wide and 16ft long raised bed and another two 16ft rows either side of the snap peas bed;

Larry, your soil looks so nice and very organic. Our soil still looks red clay even after amending it with lots of compost and garden ready mixes... I guess it may take another decade to become like your soil.

-Chandra

Chandra, thanks. My soil does look a lot better than it did when I started working on it, but it is a never-ending task. I have been work in the soil above for 6 years, it is still very wet and heavy. I keep adding organic matter trying to raise the level up somewhat like a raised bed. I don't want to place a border around it because of our age and health may force us to stop gardening and I don't want to have to remove a border when that happens.

Larry

Most of the potatoes showing up and seems to be doping OK. I see some missing spots here and there, I guess they are on the way.

Hello,

I'm curious how long does it typically take for a non-chitted seed potato to send up the first shoots? For what it's worth, I'm growing Red Pontiac in a 1/2 whiskey barrel in southern Wisconsin.

Thanks!

That would depend on the variety and what length dormancy is programed into its genes. Your seed potatoes were purchased as seed potatoes, correct? If so, I suspect they'll break dormancy soon.

Someone sent me a couple of varieties of seed potatoes, not commonly available at big box stores. I've been trying to get two of these to break dormancy for over two weeks now. But they refuse to sprout. So today, I stuck them in an partially closed plastic bag and some apple cores. I'm hoping that the ethylene from the apple cores will encourage sprouting.

George
Tahlequah, OK

I have a potato plant in my broccoli now that is about 18 inches high and I have not planted potatoes in that area in 2 years.

Some of the seed potatoes I planted in ground on Feb 29 started showing shoots above ground starting from March 14. That means, for me, it took about 15 days. -Chandra

Assuming you have seed potatoes and not grocery store potatoes, I've seen them sprout in as little as 2 or 3 weeks but also have seen them take 2 months to emerge above the soil surface. A lot depends on how deeply you planted them and how cold and wet the soil is.

If you happened to use grocery store potatoes, by chance, they are sprayed with anti-sprouting agents that can take months to wear off, so it would depend on how long ago the potatoes were sprayed with anti-sprouting agents.

If it has been a month or more since you planted, you can take your trowel and dig down carefully to see if you can find the seed potatoes and see if any sort of sprouting is occurring. If you dig around in the soil in the container and don't find your seed potatoes, then it is likely they rotted or were eaten by some sort of varmint who jumped into your container and tunneled down.

Normally Red Pontiac is one of the first ones to sprout for me.

Larry, I've had that happen the last two years, indicating I must have missed tiny marble-sized potatoes when digging, and then the weather hasn't kept the soil wet and cold enough in winter to make them rot. I rotate my potatoes from bed to bed and often have an odd potato come up in last year's bed, but like you, I've had it happen the last two years in a bed from 2 years before.

George and several others on this site are way more experts on growing potatoes than I am. I had never chitted intentionally till the last few years. Sometimes I would take a store bought potato with sprouts and plant it and other times I just cut a potato in pieces with a few eyes and planted them with no sprouts showing. The last couple of years I've started growing several varieties not available normally. I've noticed a difference in the time it takes to chit them and also the time to emergence whether chitted or not between varieties. I'm growing one variety and it seems too take a long time for any sprouts to show if chitted but if planted in soil they emerge within 1-2 days of those that were chitted for several weeks. I've grown Red Pontiac in the past and it seemed to emerge with most of the others if memory serves me correctly. And that was before I did any chitting. Soil temps can affect the time some also from my experience. I had a few that weren't showing any sprouts emerge in 7-10 days this year. Then others took 2 weeks or more. Again it seemed dependent on the variety more than anything else. Jay

Thanks for speedy reply everyone! I am growing certified seed potatoes. I planted them 1 week ago and never have grown potatoes before. I don't think they'll have a problem getting going since they are in a container (1/2 whiskey barrel), but breaking the dormancy might be the longest part to wait for? I'll just be patient and hope for something in the next week or so to poke through.

A week ago? Well then, I wouldn't worry about them until about the first or even second week in June. It takes a little while for them to wake up and get growing, particularly if they weren't chitted. I hope you get a bountiful crop.

Just came in for a short break from planting potatoes to see this thread at the top so had to open it up, of course!

My pulled sprouts I planted earlier this year got knocked out by frost, at least 95% of them. So today I've been planting TPS in their spots. I had a few seeds leftover from Tom Wagner but I'm most excited about a couple of TPS varieties that Joseph (my landrace guru) shared with me. I'm so looking forward to both tubers and seed this year.

I also have a couple Moie Moie mini-tubers in the fridge that I'll be planting out in pots today. Wendy from over on TV was nice enough to share them with me. Hopefully, I'll get several tubers out of them.

Back to the grind! I still have a bunch more things to plant out today...

Diane

Well Diane, I'd say you are ahead of me on this! This is my first year to successfully raise some plants from true potato seed. I have to admit, the idea of growing from seed, instead of just from seed potatoes excites me as I can envision doing some actual breeding and selection.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I actually emasculated a couple of tomato flowers, in preparation for doing some intentional crosses. The same technique is used on potatoes. I have seedlings going, derived from Huagalina (Peruvian cultivar, noted for being a survivor) and Chaposa (Mexican, I believe).

Jay, I am excited to try Azul Toro. The plants are striking and vigorous.

When I get a chance I'll have to start a new thread on my adventures with potatoes this year.

George

I am not a big potato grower, but I have grown them a few times both in south central Oklahoma and here in NE Oklahoma. I am interested in how different they have been. In southern OK, about 30-40 miles north of Dawn, the plants were lush and beautiful and people kept asking what they were especially when they flowered.

The year that I got such a good harvest here, the plants were almost waist high and I didn't have significant flowering. This year I gave them plenty of room and planted at the right time. They grew to about 2 to 2-1/2 feet high then kind of started falling over a little. If they bloomed, I didn't notice. I am guessing that the harvest will not be as good. I suppose some is due to lack of rainfall, but the rainfall was fine when they should have been growing taller, but of course has been much less this month when they should have been making tubers.

Our water has always been very reasonable here until this year, and the cost has gone way up. That would happen in a year when the rainfall was not adequate, wouldn't it?

Carol,

I have found potato performance to be hugely variable. They don't always flower. I believe they flower more commonly in cooler weather---like if they reach a certain size and the weather is cool, they will flower one year, but at the same size with warmer weather in another year they will not flower. Somehow the temperature must be related to the flowering. This year, some of mine flowered and others didn't, and all the ones that flowered did not flower at the same time either.

Lush potato plants usually are most common in years when the air temps warm up early. In a perfect world, your potatoes will make nice, reasonable steady growth as long as the air temps are between 45 and 75. If it happens to warm up above those temps really early, the plants can go crazy and grow like mad giving you excessively lush, heavy, leafy plants.

I get the highest yields in years when the spring weather is slow to get really hot and when the moisture is consistent. In a year when they receive consistent moisture, you'll get smooth potatoes. In a year when there has been a lot of inconsistency in rainfall or irrigation, you'll often get knobby potatoes because when they are dry, the tubers stop growing, then when they receive moisture, the start growing again. The starting and stopping of growth causes the knobbiness.

Undoubtedly the lack of moisture has affected your plants somewhat. I do get better yields in wet years, as long as the ground is not so wet that the seed potatoes or plants rot early in their lives. I also get better yields when it stays cooler longer. Once the soil temp hits 85 degrees (and mine has hit 90 degrees or higher here and there already although it drops at night still), the tuber formation is pretty much done. Most potato varieties don't set new tubers once the soil is consistently above 85 degrees for most of the day. This is an area where a good deep mulch can prolong the formation of tubers by keeping the ground cooler.

I don't know how hot the soil surface was at our house today, but I was thinning the late corn plants today in an unmulched bed. It was my intention to mulch it after I had thinned because snakes hide in mulch in the corn beds and I don't want to find those snakes while thinning corn.

So....I was on my knees crawling along thinning the corn and the ground was so hot that my knees felt like they were on fire. I had to stand up and walk along, half-crouching as I thinned the corn. I think that I looked like a little duck, but at least my knees weren't on fire. I bet the soil surface was 120 degrees or higher. Now that the corn is thinned, I'm going to mulch that bed ASAP. The thought I had, though, wasn't about the corn. It was about the potatoes. I felt how warm that soil was and thought to myself "I bet the potatoes are done with tuber formation!". Of course, the potatoes are shading the ground beneath them, and they were well hilled and are well-mulched, but I still think my soil is likely already hotter than they prefer.

I was just thinking about last year's potato crop, which was the best-yielding crop I've ever had, and it defies almost everything I said above. We got too hot too early for good tuber formation, and yet we had a huge crop. What we did have going for us was all that rain in May--over 7" of it. So, last year, the heavy May rain trumped the hot temperatures, but that still is atypical for potatoes grown here at our place. I did have them heavily mulched, so maybe the heat didn't heat up the ground too much even though the air temps were ridiculously high very early.
Dawn

Variety can also make a difference. We put in some Red LaSoda this year, and they are growing more like Carol described. Yukon Gold, on the other hand, never attained much height and is dying down. It started dying down so much sooner than the others, that I at first thought there was a virus getting it. But now, as I observe the row, I bet it's simply finished. I've watered our potato patch 2 or 3 times and I don't believe it has seen a sizable rainfall but a couple of times, right after planting.

George

George, I am sure that variety makes a difference but in the case of the tall ones vs. this year, I planted Yukon Gold both times.

I think Yukon Gold is an early one and I have seen it listed as both a 90 day, and 90-100 days. I don't know exactly what day I planted, but I saw a posting of mine on 25 Feb where I said I had already planted, so I am at the 90 day point.

I planted a red potato the same day and it is going to be a little later, but not much. I bought it at Bartlesville Atwoods and the bin wasn't marked. I just chose the bin with the best looking potatoes and since I was only planting a few, it really didn't matter.

A couple of weeks later, I put in 8 small Kennebec potatoes, so I have 3 varieties planted. They all have grown to about the same height and the only real difference that I see at this point is that the Yukon Gold are finishing up. They are growing in a different part of the garden this year and the sun doesn't reach them as early, nor have they had as much water. We normally have heavy Spring rain and this year we have had "La Nada". LOL

Can we talk about harvesting potatoes? I've never grown them before. They look horrible right now. Do I need to let them completely die back before harvesting? Do they need to be dry for a certain amount of time before harvest?

Leslie

As with tomatoes, some potatoes exhibit a determinate growth habit and others exhibit indeterminate growth---but not exactly in the same way that tomatoes do.

The determinates, of which Yukon Gold is one, get only so tall and they're done. They set their tubers pretty early and then it is over. They are either early or mid-season ones, producing in maybe 80-90 days most of the time.

Other types, which are indeterminate in nature, tend to grow taller (and I think they produce more per plant, though that's just my opinion, not a stated fact) and they produce later.

Leslie, Because you have had a lot of rain, it is hard to know if they look horrible because they're done, or if they look horrible because all the rainfall on the foliage caused some foliar diseases. Potatoe plants get all kinds of foliar diseases (similar to tomato plants) that can cause yellowing and browning on the leaves, and sometimes it is hard to look at them and know if they are sick or if they're done.

One way to know if they are done is to take a trowel and dig gently around one plant to see how many potatoes are there and how large they are. If they are the right size for the variety you planted, they likely are done. If they seem smallish and if the plants still have living foliage, you can leave them a while longer. Just replace the soil around the tubers you were checking, pat it down into place, and if it seems really dry, give it a little bitty sprinkle with the hose to settle the soil back in around the tubers.

Most of the time, potatoes, regardless of variety, need to set and size their crop before your soil temperatures begin staying at 85 degrees and above. In soils hotter than that, tuber initiation and growth really tend to slow down. So, if your soil temperatures are consistently staying above 85 degrees, your crop likely is about as big as it is going to get. However, if you put 4 to 6 inches of mulch (I use hay or straw or grass clippings--they all work) on top of that hot soil, you can drop the soil temp quite a bit and maybe keep your potato plants setting and sizing tubers a while longer.

In general, potatoes thrive and produce best when daytime air range between 60-75 during the day and 45-55 at night. That puts your part of the state at a disadvantage when growing potatoes because y'all exceed those temps so early in the growing season. This is why we have to plant our potatoes so darn early---because we can get so hot so early here.

Most potato varieties give you about as many potatoes as they can produce about 90-120 days after planting. So, if you remember exactly when you planted, you can add up the days and see if the plants have been in the ground long enough to be 'done'.

Normally, healthy potato plants indicate they are ready for harvest by turning yellow and starting to die back. So, if your foliage is turning yellow, it could be that your crop is ready. However, like tomatoes, many diseases turn potato foliage yellow, and I find it hard to tell sometimes if my plants are saying "I'm done" or "I'm sick".

Having said that, there's no wrong time to harvest potatoes. You can harvest them and use them at any size.

If you are growing a large number of plants and know that you intend to store some of the potatoes long-term, just cut the tops off the plants about 5 days before you want to dig the potatoes. That will allow the skin to cure a little, getting a bit thicker and tougher, which will allow them to store longer. (If they are not close to maturity, the skin may not thicken and toughen though.)

To harvest, plunge a spading fork into the ground about 12" from the main stem of each plant and work your way inward carefully so that you are not spearing potatoes with the tines of the fork. Or, if you have loose, fluffy soil, you can use a spade or trowel. If you use the spading fork or a spade or shovel, plunge it into the earth as deeply as you can and lift up the whole plant. Most of the potatoes will be there. Remove any that are adhering to the plant, and dig carefully in the soil in that area to find any that did not come up out of the ground with the spading fork. It is really easy to miss some, so take your time and dig down carefully after you've removed the main clump of potatoes from each plant. You will be surprised how many you find that did not come up out of the ground with the main plant. I rarely find any that are more than a foot from the main stem of the plant.

For long-term storage, place unwashed potatoes in a cool, dry area. Be sure to first use any that were sliced open while digging because their wound may not heal, and that will cause them to go bad early. I usually keep the freshly-dug potatoes in my tornado shelter, but I've had them last almost as long when I put them on the floor of my unheated pantry which sits underneath the staircase and stays pretty cool. The perfect temperature for potato storage is about 40 degrees, but here in OK we just do the best we can. My grandfather built a little lean-too with an earthen floor off the south side of his garage that had an earthen and he just piled up the potatoes in a corner of that lean too. I always was surprised how cool and dark his lean-to was even in the summer months, and his potatoes lasted well into winter.

Most years I miss a few small potatoes while digging, and they tend to grow and give us surprise potatoes the next year.

You can harvest and use potatoes any time you want. They are edible at any size. I just try to leave them in the ground as long as possible to maximize the size of the crop.

If you've counted up the days and think your potatoes should not be ready yet, then the foliage may have a disease. Sometimes when that happens, I wait it out. If the potatoes are diseased, they'll tend to start putting out new foliage to replace the sick foliage. After the new foliage has emerged, I cut off the old, crappy-looking foliage. If your leaves are only yellowing and have no brown, black, tan or purplish spots or splotches, they may be done. The presence of spots or splotches on the yellow leaves is usually an indicator of a potato disease.

Hope this helps,

Dawn

My potatos have hornworms, I keep checking the tomatos, but none there. Is anyone else getting hornworms now?

I was wondering about the harvest too, thanks for asking Leslie. Mine seem to be dying back, but I am unsure, maybe they are sick. They are turning "crispy" brown. Will it hurt the potatos if I wait too long to harvest? I planted on March 1st...I just looked that up. Its been about 80 days. They have looked really healthy till this week. What do yall think?

BTW, when my DH asked how I will know when the potatos are ready, I told him, "Whenever Dawn posts that she harvested potatos they are ready"

Hi Tracey,

I haven't seen any tobacco or tomato hornworms, but have seen a cherry hornworm. Nor have I seen any hornworm damage on tomato plants. However, I see the moths every evening and sometimes in the early morning hours, so I know they are here. It certainly is not too early for hornworms. At our house, I sometimes see them as early as March on brugmansias grown in molasses feed tubs. Since I drag the brugs into the garage on really cold winter nights, they never lose all their leaves. Consequently, they're often hit by pests in Feb or March when there's not much else available yet for the hornworms (or spider mites).

I rarely have hornworm damage on my tomato plants. By rarely, I mean sometimes never at all the whole growing season, and sometimes I see a little in August. I believe that a combination of factors give us little hornworm damage in our garden, including the many native plants they feast upon that fill our local pastures and draw them away from the garden, and also the borage, basil and four o'clocks I grow. Many years ago, I noticed that when I have a lot of these plants in and around the veggie garden, I see almost no hornworm damage.

You can spray your potato foliage with Bt 'kurstaki', which is found in several products like Thuricide ( liquid) or Dipel (a dust). That will put an end to hornworm damage on the potato plants.

With potatoes, it is hard to guess if they are sick or if they are done without seeing them, and I am not sure I could tell by looking at them. Many of the fungal and bacterial diseases on potatoes (and tomatoes) look very much alike and accurate diagnosis, even from photos, can be difficult since you often have two or more diseases in combination. Also, some insect damage, like potato leafhopper damage, can look surprisingly similar to diseases.

I would not think that potatoes planted March 1st already would be fully mature. No matter how early I plant or what varieties I plant, harvest time tends to remain late June through mid-July in my garden. I do not like to harvest them until all the foliage has died back. Then, I'll wait a week or two for the skins to toughen up before I dig them.

One way you might be able to tell if it is disease damage on your foliage is that often, when you have foliage dieback on potatoes, if you just ignore it, new growth will begin to appear within a week or so. That's one clue that the potatoes aren't done yet.

Some years I will harvest my potatoes early because I am dying to put some sort of heat-loving crop like purple hull pink eye peas or okra in their bed. However, when I harvest early I get a smaller harvest and lots of tiny potatoes that likely would have gotten quite large if I'd left them alone and let them grow until they were 'done', instead of harvesting them just because I decided I wanted to. So, I try to leave them alone and let them grow.

Because your plants looked good until this week and then turned crispy brown, it might be a sign they are done. However, it might be a sign that you had rain within the last couple of weeks and some foliage disease is hitting as a result of moisture on the leaves.

Before I harvest, I dig into the ground around a plant that looks done to see how large the potatoes are. If they are not as large as I know they should be, I wait to see if the plant will put out new growth. You'd be surprised at how often they seem to die back and then suddenly begin regrowing after a few days.

Having said all that, potatoes are harvestable and are edible at any size. So, harvest when you choose, but do so with the knowledge that harvesting early gives you smaller potatoes. For some people, the desire to plant a succession crop in the soil occupied by potatoes trumps their desire to leave the plants a few more weeks in order to get more potatoes and larger potatoes.

When I am ready to dig potatoes, I'll let you know! : )

I do have to add that earlier in the week neither my potatoes nor my onions looked like they were even close to being ready, just from looking at them. However, my onion tops are starting to flop over a little, so I think that they'll be ready for harvest in a couple of weeks. With the potatoes, I have several varieties planted, and one variety either has a foliar disease or it is beginning to finish up as it is yellowing and browning. All of this is a real recent development.

I don't "need" for the onions and potatoes to be ready right now because I am struggling to keep up with the harvesting, eating and processing of plums, tomatoes, green beans, zucchini and summer squash. Since the last thing I need this week is for one more thing to be ready to harvest, I'll probably walk outside in a few minutes and discover my onions and potatoes are declaring themselves "ready". Since I am getting ready to harvest the early sweet corn, the potatoes and onions likely will be ready to harvest now just out of spite and a desire to work me to death. lol

Since I mentioned potato leafhopper damage, I'll link a photo that shows some potato leafhopper damage on a potato plant.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Potato Leafhopper

Thank you for all of that information, Dawn. That's exactly the type of reply I was hoping for. I found a link that talked about potato diseases with pictures and I didn't really see any that totally fit, but a few that could be possible. There's no spotting on the leaves, so that narrowed it down. They had so much cutworm damage and I thought they were recovering, but this may just be some of the aftermath of that, too. It's been 88 days since they were planted, so they could also just be getting close to finished. There's not really much I can do about it whatever it is, so I'll just be patient until they've died back and harvest whatever is there.

Leslie

Thanks Dawn! I investigated my potatos further and decided that they were under attack by leafhoppers. I followed your advice and feel optimistic about the results. Thank you!

DH says that he has never seen onions grow as big as mine...I told him its all due to the great advice I get on the Okla GW. BTW Im originally from Canada, so having a "local" resource for info is the "secret of my success".

Leslie, You're welcome. I hope when all that foliage finishes dying down, you find a lot of nice potatoes in the soil.

You're right when you say there's not much you can do about it. Despite all our efforts, basically the plants are gonna do what they're gonna do.

Tracey, You're welcome too. I'm always glad to help. The possibility of leafhoppers seemed like a good one and it is one pest I see a lot here. I have hopperburn all over my tomato plants. I've never had it as heavy as this before, and I've only seen a few leafhoppers, but there's undoubtedly more of them that I'm not seeing.

It is a really good onion here too. As long as you plant short-day, intermediate-day or daylength-neutral onions at the right time in well-draining soil, make sure they have lots of water and nitrogen-rich soil or supplemental nitrogen fertilizer, you'll get a great harvest. Onions in a good year make all of us look like incredible gardeners, don't they? In a bad year, we just blame the excess rain or wild swings from hot to cold or hard, late freezes. It is never our fault when the onions fail, right?

Dawn

When counting the days of growth for a potato, is it from time of sprouting or planting?
Of course, I don't even know exactly what kind I have. Somebody from West TX sent me some nice red seed potatoes and I've since lost the labels. I also don't remeber the exact planting date. It was sometime early Feb, maybe even very late Jan. They took about three weeks to sprout.
We had really, really high temps last week. 110 was the highest. Thankfully, it's nice and cool this weekend but it's supposed to be back up there again this week.
I have them very thickly mulched and shaded with sheets. But, I don't know if they are burning up or dying off. I tried digging down and didn't see many little potatoes. Not sure if I didn't dig far enough or there just aren't any.

Time to bump this thread for every thing there is to say about potatoes.

Thanks for finding this for me Helen. last year I didn't get one potato from my 12 plants so I will need to study again what to do.
Kim

Should I chit my potatoes this weekend? In case I have the term wrong, I mean cut the eyes off. We really didn't get much rain. I won't be able to plant for about eight more days if it doesn't rain again. Longer if it does.

some of the taters are just beginning to enter the "spent" phase.
bon

And what is up with this forum thread being so wonky?

I'm not sure what you are planning to do with your potatoes, but you don't really "cut the eyes off" of ones you plan to plant. And since you say they are "spent" do you mean these are grocery store potatoes getting soft? What you do with potatoes that you want to plant is cut them into pieces with at least one eye (sprout) on each piece. I like to leave two eyes and cut the pieces about the size of an egg. If your potatoes already have sprouts, you can simply plant them whole or cut them and let the cuts cure for a couple days. I always sulfur mine as Dawn describes above because our soil is heavy. The sulfur helps prevent rot.

lol dawn

Mulberry, that was very helpful. The eyes are bugging out everywhere on these potatoes I bought from Atwoods even though I've kept them in a cool spot to slow 'em down. And some are getting soft. Anyways, that's what I'll do later this week, then.

Dawn I am not sure what happened really. it was only my third time to grow potatoes.
The first time was with regular white potatoes and it was a great success and got me hooked!
Second time a volunteer plant from the compost pile produced well.
Last year I planted purple potatoes with plenty of eyes, great soil at the " right " time, but I think I was lacking enough sun. My tomato plants got huge and shaded the potato bed. they were about 4 feet away.
They never bloomed and then died back at the "right " time and no potatoes, not even a nub. I don't really know enough to figure it out but my little neighbor guy was so sad this year I am going to check before I let him dig, then I can fix it [as in bury some from the kitchen quick] if there is nothing there.
I can only eat purple potatoes and sweet potatoes so I really want to be successful this year. My plan is new area, more sunshine and alot more compost. They are ready to go in but it was raining so I thought I would wait till tomorrow.
Kim

This thread reminded me of Chandra. Guess we aren't the only one with strange weather, since he said it snowed in Amman, Jordan this week. I think bad weather follows Chandra. LOL

I can't believe how much time has passed. Very good potato thread.

I don't know why these threads keep aging so much. Surely all of us are not getting older, right?

Not a minute. Nope. These are our brain etchings saved for all time.

Love the potato conversation!

Poor Chandra. I bet snow was not what he was expecting! He does have the worst luck with weather. I bet the kids were excited about the snow.

'The Martian' movie everyone should see Matt Damon grow potatoes on Mars.