This is my 1st time growing potatoes, but I agree, they are beautiful!! I was just thinking the other day, I could plant them anywhere and be happy bc they are so wonderful to look at!

There are lots of pretty flowers on plants in the Solanaceae family - think sweet potatoes, datura, brugmansia, nicotiana, petunias, cestrum, iochroma, callibrachoa, salpiglossis, blue potato vine, bicameral, and many more.

Susan

They are beautiful, and they look so much better than mine. I broke down and watered yesterday, long after I should. I need to use some kind of fertilizer also, plus something for the bugs. My potatoes and Chinese cabbage has a lot of damage.

Larry

I do love the flowers on the solanaceas. I grow a lot of them. In addition to the potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, etc., I have datura, nicotiana, brugmansia, callibrachoa and petunias in the garden currently. Everything is in bloom except part of the potatoes, the daturas and the brugmansias.

Our potatoes that were planted first started blooming 2 or 3 weeks ago. Now, each row is blooming sequentially as it reaches the right age and stage, depending on when it was planted. The potato plantings were staggered over a fairly long period of time because I was dealing with the rebuilding of the the garden's raised beds and lots of rain and mud.

About 2/3's of the potato plants are in bloom. Some flowers are white, some are pink and some are lavender. I have had to handpick and destroy maybe a total of 12 or 15 Colorado Potato Beetles which isn't bad because I have about 360 row feet of potato plants.

While I was sitting in the tornado shelter this evening, the potatoes finally were rained upon. It was our first decent rain in almost a month, although we had 0.04" of rain about 3 weeks ago. That four/one-hundredths of an inch didn't go far. I don't think much rain fell. It was so windy as the storm-warned cell passed over that I couldn't tell at times how hard the rain was falling. Hopefully it was a decent amount. I watered everything either Sunday or Monday but the ground is so dry it just slurped up that moisture.

Bre, I always think the same thing about potato plants at this time of year. However, as the plants near maturity, they start looking really bad because they are dying back naturally. I always feel like I have to explain to garden visitors "the potatoes are supposed to look like this as they reach the harvest point.....". lol If you like them, you'd love the blue potato vine.

If the potatoes would stay lovely all summer, I'd plant them in a more prominent place, but I always put them as far from public view as I can manage so that when they start looking bad, no one knows but me. One year I had them growing right beside the driveway and everyone who came to our house would say "What's wrong with your potatoes?" and I'd have to go through the whole spiel about how the potatoes look like that as they near maturity. Same thing with onions....when the necks start falling over, my non-gardening friends start asking why my onions are dying. : )

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Blue Potato Vine

Yours are ahead of ours. Not a bloom yet, but also not a potato beetle. Last year we had lots by the time the plants were ths big, which we handpicked every single day. Maybe we decimated the population.

Last year we had some sort of caterpillar eating them up. By the time we finally got rid of the caterpillars, the potatoes were a mess. Our yield wasn't half of what it should've been.

This year, we've got something eating small holes in the leaves of some of them, but nothing major...yet.

Then, there's a couple of them that I've pretty much killed off with a hula hoe. I become ...enthusiastic...when I start weeding.

Dorothy, Maybe you did wipe out all of them last year.

We have potatoes in 3 separate areas and only one of those areas has had the potato beetles. Other beds in that garden that sit directly across a 2'-wide pathway haven't even had them. I grew potatoes in that raised bed two years ago and did have some CPBs hatch out in it last year, but thought I got all of them. Apparently I didn't.

I planted far too many potatoes and planted them in little spurts of activity over a fairly long period of time, so the oldest ones are between 3 and 4' tall and the youngest ones are only about a foot tall. Merely because there's so many potato plants, I have been expecting major CPB trouble, but so far it has been only minor trouble. I'm hoping I caught and squished them all before they could lay more eggs. All of the plants aren't blooming yet. About 60% have bloomed, and the bloom time definitely seems linked to the variety. In most cases you see where one variety stops and another starts because either the blooms change colors or there are no blooms.

I'll be miserable at potato digging time. We have 6 rows of potatoes 40' long , 8 rows 12' long and 4 rows 10' long. I'll be hot and tired and cranky while digging them....but we'll likely have a year's supply of potatoes when I'm done. Since I planted far less tomato plants this year, that opened up a lot of space, and I filled it with potatoes.

Wbonesteel, In my garden, it is teeny-tiny grasshoppers that are eating holes in the potato foliage right now. They've been at it for days. The ones I've seen this week are about 1/16" long and are brown. I have a lot of song birds in the garden all the time (until I walk into it) and I think they are catching all the grasshoppers they can find and are eating them, because the larger grasshoppers (maybe 1/4" long and most were green) that were in there last week aren't around any more. I've also found some potato leaf hoppers in there and have killed every single one I've seen...which has been only 3 or 4.

Last year was a bad year pretty much statewide for cutworms, including the climbing cutworms, and for army worms. After I sprayed the plants (although I wish I'd sprayed earlier) with Bt, that was the end of them. We must have wiped them out for the most part because I haven't seen many of those this year either, or maybe the birds have been eating the army worms.

Today while I was in the garden picking sugar snap peas, the rows of potatoes were buzzing with lots of bees, especially big fat bumble bees, visiting the potato flowers. The sugar snap peas have been doing great all spring and we've picked a lot of them. Today was the final harvest. Ever since we started hitting the mid-90s a day or two a week, they have been developing powdery mildew down low to the ground, and now it is moving up the plants. So, after I harvested two 5-gallon buckets full of snap peas this morning, I pulled up all the pea plants and hauled them to the compost piles. I'll work compost into those areas tomorrow and plant a summer crop of something else in the now-bare space.

I get too enthusiastic when weeding too and am my garden's own worst enemy once I get going. Luckily, since I overplant and have too much of everything, we can afford to lose a few plants here and there and we don't even miss them. (I deliberately overplant so that I can kill a few plants and still have plenty.)

I loved working outside in the garden this morning. It was so cool and foggy and really pleasant despite the high humidity. Then the sun came out and ruined it out....it is too muggy out there now to be considered pleasant, so I am going to process all the snap peas this afternoon, putting aside some fresh ones to eat over the next few days and then blanching and freezing the rest.

Dawn

Dawn, I plant potatoes about the same way you've described. When I start planting potatoes, I seem to have a hard time stopping myself...

I read about how many potatoes you have and I winced. That's a lot to dif up all at once. We've only got eighty or ninety, all together. We've planted some of them along the fence in the back yard. (Notice that I haven't shared any pics of the back yard? Nothing to be ashamed of, but nothing to brag about, either.)

Thanks for the reminder about the peas. I've got to get out there and get the rest of the snow peas in. Ours are looking about the way you've described yours. Just about time to think about getting them out of the way.

Like you, I overplant a bit and for much the same reasons.

We have at least eight different kinds of birds playing around in the garden, this year. Three of them really like the strawberries. I haven't seen the cardinals and bluejays, yet, though. Last year, there was one that looked like an oriole. Never did get a good look at it. Haven't seen a robin this year, either. Mebbe I'm just not looking in the right place at the right time...

They are, and don't forget to keep an eye out for the rare occurrence of one that actually sets seed. The famous Burbank Russet (AKA Idaho Potato) came from a small (23 seeds) seed harvest in Luther Burbank's sizable potato patch. My understanding is that he grew and tested all twenty-three seeds but the other plants were not "anything special".

Here is a link that might be useful: Luther Burbank Agricultural Inventor