Feeling sustainable? Want to grow all of your own vegetables? Why not have a go at growing your own potatoes, it’s quite easy.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
I recommend that you begin by using seed potatoes. These need to be purchased either from a produce store or one of our local nurseries – seed potatoes are disease and virus free. They’re more expensive than just throwing old potatoes in the ground but you’re more likely to get good results.
Potatoes can be planted from around August to October, give or take a few weeks, so now is a great time to prepare your garden bed and prepare your potatoes.
Spread your seed potatoes out in the light, this will encourage shoots to start growing. Shoots only need to be about one centimetre long, however, this can take a few weeks to achieve at this time of the year.
Now you need to prepare your garden bed – dig in masses of well-aged animal manure or compost. Dig a trench about 10 to 15cm deep and line the bottom of this trench with more compost. Place your potatoes in this trench approximately 20 to 30cm apart and make sure your shoots are facing upwards. Now fill in the trench. As shoots appear above the ground you will need to cover them with soil, just scrape soil from either side to ‘hill-up’ the growing plants. Do this a few times to give the plants a mound of nice rich soil to produce potatoes in. Now let the plants grow with no intervention apart from regular watering.
If you don’t have a lot of room or space for a big bed of potatoes – they will grow quite well in containers. One old method is to grow crops of potatoes in tyres, this is now not done because of potatoes accumulating heavy metals that can leach from the tyres.
Potatoes can be harvested after about four months or as soon as the potatoes are the size you want. If you don’t want to dig around to check potato size then wait until the leaves begin to turn yellow. If you harvest when just the lower leaves have turned yellow you will have new potatoes. When the top of the foliage is yellow or has died off you will have larger potatoes to dig. You can harvest all at once or on a meal-to-meal basis, both methods are fine.
Potatoes are the epitome of versatility – they have a thousand uses in the kitchen and are just so easy to grow.
So instead of popping to the supermarket for a bag of spuds, make it a trip to your own garden with your spade.
Diary: The Growing Friends of Albury Botanic Gardens open their nursery, behind the curator’s cottage, from 9.30am to noon, Tuesday and Thursday. If you want to learn about propagation, have fun and enjoy friendly company come join the growing friends volunteers.