You can’t do better than the food you grow yourself at home when giving your family the best nutrition to help them grow strong and healthy bodies. This makes sure that your food is grown without a lot of chemicals that you don’t want.
Root or tuber vegetables like potatoes can be much healthier if you grow them at home. The soil nutrients in grown potatoes are not as good as what you can get when you grow potatoes at home. It’s easy to grow and harvest your potatoes. If you add enough good nutrients to your soil, your potatoes will be full of nutrients that will help keep your family happy and healthy.
When To Sow Potatoes
Where you grow your potatoes will determine when you should plant them. Potatoes should be planted after an average soil temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit is reached and the last chance of frost has passed. This will help the plants grow. Many people who grow potatoes in pots start them inside before the last frost. This lets them keep the potatoes warm and gives the leaves a grow light so they can get a crop of potatoes sooner.
Potato Planting: How Do You Do It?
Plant your potatoes so that the eyes are facing up. This will help your plant get off the ground quickly and start growing without being turned over to start growing toward the sun. Cover the sprouted potatoes’ eyes with soil and add more soil every couple of weeks to get the potatoes growing. This will help them grow faster and make more potatoes in less time.
To grow healthy potatoes, you must ensure they get enough food. You shouldn’t use the same soil for potatoes two years in a row, and each time you add soil on top of your potatoes, you should mix in compost or another form of fertilizer.
If you want the best potatoes, you need the best soil possible in your garden. Give potatoes 1 to 2 inches of water weekly to give them what they need to grow and carry important nutrients. When growing potatoes in pots, let the soil get dry to the touch between waterings so you don’t give them too much water.
Partner Plantation Of Potatoes
If you want the best crop of potatoes in a big pot with room to spare or a mound in the ground, you should plant them with other plants. Most plants can’t get enough of what they need to grow when potatoes are around, but green beans and other lingams like peas and lima beans are great nitrogen-fixing companion plants for nutrient-hungry potatoes.
After the last layer of soil, we like to grow bush beans in the pots with our potatoes. Brush beans will grow quickly so you can harvest the potatoes and beans simultaneously. The nitrogen from the bush beans will help your potatoes grow better by giving them more nutrition.
To Grow Potatoes, Use Seed Potatoes
Most of the time, people use seed potatoes to plant potatoes. You can buy seed potatoes online or at a nearby nursery early in the spring. Seed potatoes have been grown organically and have grown several eyes that can be planted. Conventionally grown potatoes can’t be used as seed potatoes because they’ve been treated to prevent sprouting and make them last longer when stored.
How To Grow Tubs From Eyes
Even when chemicals are used to treat potatoes, they often still sprout eyes. You can make this happen faster by putting an onion in with the potatoes you want to sprout. Since the gas that onions give off makes potatoes sprout, it is best to store them separately, even though the best conditions for storing both are the same.
Grandma’s Way: Grow Your Potatoes
My grandma couldn’t grow anything to save her life, but someone else’s grandma used to grow potatoes this way. The hills or mounds method is still used on large farms and homesteads with a lot of space.
Most of the time, potatoes are planted in mounds or hills. This lets the soil warm up faster and gives vines more room to grow than in a flat garden bed. Growing potatoes in mounds takes up a lot of space and is best for people with a large garden. Most families can grow more potatoes if they grow them in containers.
Before you start to get your potato bed ready, you shouldn’t use the same soil in your potato garden that you used last year to grow potatoes or other high-demand root vegetables. This keeps the soil from getting used up and gives you better produce.
To grow in hills, you must set up your rows with small mounds, put in your seed potatoes and plants, and then cover with about 2 inches of dirt. After two weeks, add more dirt to the hills to get more potatoes to grow.
Add soil, compost, or fertilizer on top of 6 to 8 inches tall plants to keep your mounds growing and get the most out of them. This will help your plants make more food and make the soil better. Another great way to improve the soil in your potato garden is to plant green beans next to them. Green beans naturally fix nitrogen in the soil.
Bag-Growing Potatoes
Potatoes can be grown in bags the same way they can be grown in other containers, but bags are a bit more secure. Potato growing sacks can be rolled down to let the sun reach your potato plants as they grow and roll up when you need to keep adding soil and compost.
Some potato-growing sacks even have a door on the side so you can open it and take out the early potatoes while leaving the potatoes on top alone. You can add soil to the top for a season’s homegrown potatoes.
Where And How Do Potatoes Form?
Potatoes are tubers or roots that grow at the bottom of the plant’s stems. Because of this, you have to bury your potatoes deeper for a few weeks after you plant them. As you add more soil to your potatoes, you burn the stems more to make more tubers from the stems.
Hence, rather than being at the base of the root system, your potatoes will always be above the area where you planted them. When you’re harvesting your potatoes, take a moment to show your kids what the potato plant looks like under the soil. This is especially helpful for kids to see if you are harvesting early to use right away instead of storing for the winter.
Potato Harvesting Techniques
It’s pretty easy to get potatoes from your garden, but if you’re not careful, you can cut or bruise them, making them last less long when you store them. In the future, use the mounds from your potatoes to plant another plant and fertilize it by removing the dirt from their mounds. Make sure you got all of your potatoes by digging them out until the mound is flat.
Harvesting potatoes from pots is much easier, and you’re less likely to hit them with a garden shovel. To dump out your potato plant pots, spread out a sizable tarp or utilize the garden bed where you’ll lay your potato soil the next year. After you empty your containers, you can pick out the fully grown potatoes by sifting through the loose dirt.
