Potatoes Garden Planting Tips: Start with Certified Seed Potatoes— they’re Disease-Free

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.

I plant my earliest potatoes 5 to 6 weeks before the last expected frost and use Red Norland potatoes because they will produce early. A frost before the plants come up is no problem. The soil will insulate them. But if the young leaves have popped through the soil and there’s a frost warning, I push the soil from the walkways up over each plant. In a few day the leaves grow back up through the soil as if nothing had happened.

A second Potatoes Crop for Winter Keeping

After the average last frost day in our area, I plant a larger crop of potatoes, including plenty of the Kennebecvariety—a super potato that stores well.

I want the potatoes from this second planting to go into the root cellar just before the first frost of early fall. My root cellar is cool at that time of year, perfect for keeping potatoes .

As with other vegetables, I stick with my tried and true varieties, Red Norland and Kennebec. But it’s always fun to plant some others, such as Katandin, Green Mountain, the novelty variety Lady Finger for early boiled potatoes, or a short row of Idahobaking potatoes.

Plan Ahead for a Potato Patch

To get the best potatoes, I look ahead at least two or three seasons. Since potatoes like soil pH from 4.8 to 5.5 I hold off on liming future potato areas. The soil pH in these areas will gradually drop into the potato range.

One benefit of this plan is that my potatoes rarely have scab on them. Common scab is a fungus disease which can be very active if the soil pH is 6.0 or higher. Scab doesn’t ruin potates but it disfigures their skins. You must peel them before using.

If you use manure in your garden, treat it like lime because it also promotes scab. Do not use it on your potato patch a year before planting.

Can’t find Certified Potatoes? Try this.

Nothing beats a good baking potato, and the Idaho varieties, called “Russets,” are some of the best ones to grow. Trouble is, certified Russet seed potatoes aren’t available where I live. That’s because Russets don’t do their best in New England’s wet and humid summers. The certified potatoes are all grown and used out West.

Still, I like to grow a row or two of them. Here’s how I get my seed potatoes:

About a month before planting I go to the supermarket and get a few pounds of some good-looking Idaho potatoes. Back home I spread out a layer of them in a shallow box and put the box in a warm room near a sunny window. Over the next few weeks the potatoes will wear down the anti-sprout chemicals they were treated with. They’ll slowly begin to send out shoots. Because they are in the light, these shoots won’t grow fast—they’ll stay small. (Not like potatoes kept in the dark.) A few potatoes may not sprout at all. I don’t plant those.

At planting time I gather up the sprouted potatoes, cut the large ones up like other seed potatoes, and plant them.

Whether the potatoes are diseased and what our summer weather is like determine how this crop performs. I usually get a pile of potatoes as big and flavorful as the “bakers” straight from Idaho.

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