A good potato crop starts with good seed potatoes. Get the best ones you can because you don’t have many chances at planting time. A garden store will have certified seed potatoes that are free of disease. These are the best. Don’t rely on old potatoes from your root cellar because they could be carrying disease organisms without showing it.

When you buy seed potatoes, you’ll get some small ones. Plant these whole. Cut the bigger ones into two or three blocky pieces, being sure to cut them so that each piece has two or three buds, or “eyes.” I cut up seed potatoes a day or two before planting and leave them in a warm place. This gives the cut surfaces time to heal over and dry out a little.

I also douse seed potatoes with sulfur immediately after cutting them up. Sulfur powder is a cheap, natural protectant available at most drug stores. Two ounces will protect 10 pounds of seed potatoes. Put the cut and whole potatoes in a paper bag. Add 1 or 2 tablespoons of sulfur and shake the bag. The powder sticks to the potatoes and helps keep out rot organisms. This sulfur also will lower the soil pH around the potatoes a bit. That’s good because potatoes like an acid soil. Read the rest of this entry »

Plant Slips on Raised Beds for big Potatoes

To grow sweet potatoes, start with “slips,” which are tiny plants sprouted from sweet potatoes. Here’s how I grow the slips I need each spring.

About 7 to 8 weeks before the average last frost date I get some sweet potatoes from the market. I cut them in half lengthwise and lay the pieces cut-side-down in aluminum cake plates filled with moist peat moss. I put a shallow covering of moist peat moss over the potato pieces and wrap the works in a plastic bag.

As soon as the slips appear, I take off the plastic and put the plants in a sunny window. After our last frost date, I pull each slip and plant it separately. It will grow to a full-sized sweet potato plant.

You can also get slips by sprouting a section of sweet potato in a jar of water. Like sprouting an avocado pit, most of each piece should be submerged in water on the kitchen windowsill. Read the rest of this entry »