Potato Patch

[bower]

One thing for sure, whatever spud you harvest will be worth bags of supermarket potatoes, for the taste alone.

[GoDawgs]

Yours are farther along than the ones here which were planted March 11. It's almost time to start watching for the danged Colorado potato beetles. They show up here around mid-late April. Last year the first one was noticed on April 29 but fortunately last year there weren't many at all. Go figure.

[karstopography]

My Yukon Gold are blooming, this I know from the purple blooms with egg yolk centers. From what I have read, it’s another 6 weeks or so to harvest. Looks like some of the others are budding. Read something about leaving on blooms/fruit versus pulling them off and effects on production. Doesn’t seem to a hard and fast rule, blooms and fruiting might lower tuber productivity, but the flowers are pretty so they are staying. I’m committed to not get any new potatoes, but let the plants go to maturity and die before harvesting.

Haven’t had much sign of pests. Interestingly, some large red ants, either leaf cutting ants or red harvester ants, have set up shop in the potato patch. They haven’t cut up the leaves, but crawl over them so maybe they are the harvester type.

[brownrexx]

They look nice [mention]karstopography[/mention] I just bought my seed potatoes yesterday. I will not plant until mid May but I was worried about shortages and it turned out to be right. They were already sold out of the 2 red varieties as well as Yukon Gold and Katadin. Luckily I wanted Kennebec and they still had a few bags. I asked about yellow and she had about 10 bags of Keuka in the back. I never heard of Keuka but it was developed at Cornell and is similar to Yukon Gold. It also has some scab resistance and tolerant to periods of uneven water so I am excited to try it.

[karstopography]

549B3AE7-2DA3-4FB6-89B6-3C6F658BE3C9.jpeg

Couldn’t resist, dug up some new potatoes.

[worth1]

Just awesome.

[karstopography]

E85EE871-9E87-4014-95AD-17E08E83F690.jpeg

Potato patch is closed as of 2022. Dug up about 19 pounds today and maybe 8 or 9 pounds previously that have been consumed. Planted ~7 pounds of seed potatoes, all whole ones rather than cut. I tried to find whole egg sized seed potatoes, but some ended up bigger than that.

The Kennebec are the white ones, the rest are mostly Red Pontiac. Super fun and delicious to boot. Have to use a tool to dig, the fire ants like to share the beds with potatoes in them.

Planted Tennessee Red Valencia Peanuts in the potatoes bed. Good day to garden.

[bower]

My supermarket had seed potatoes and onion sets when I went in there some weeks ago - way too early for us to plant, and much too tempting for me to resist. So I have a 2 kilo bag each of Yukon Gold, Pontiac Red, and Norland. I think this is going to go in Dad's old potato garden, for another 'land reclamation by potatoes' which we hope to also produce some spuds.

[GoDawgs]

Have to use a tool to dig, the fire ants like to share the beds with potatoes in them.

Danged fire ants! Here's how to move them out of your bed. Get a one gallon jug of water with enough room to add 1/4 cup of dish washing liquid. Put your hand over the jug top and slowly tip the jug over and under a few times to mix the water and soap. Slowly pour the mix onto the ant hill from about chest high. You'll know you're on target when the mix just keeps going down, down, down with no run off. Pour the whole jug on the hill. Maybe when you're halfway done, slowly move that stream around the rest of the nest away from the main tunnel to get the other entryways. The next day there will be tons of dead ants at the top of the former mound. They usually show up at the inside edges of my beds.

Most dish soaps are phosphate free now. It won't hurt your plants. It also won't kill the queen because she's waaaaaay down under but they'll go away and set up shop somewhere else, not in your bed. The lady at the feed and seed who told me about this a long time ago said "be sure to use the green colored Dawn liquid. " Not so. Any color and any brand seems to work. It's the soap messing with the ant's waxy coating. They can't swim and they drown. Give it a shot!

[karstopography]

Good tips on managing the imported fire ants. @GoDawgs curses on whoever brought them into Mobile, Alabama all those years ago.

I used my all shiny, smooth metal Hoss tools Garden fork to dig up the potatoes and to keep the ants away from crawling on my person and inflicting their painful stings. I was careful with the fork and didn’t damage too many potatoes. The ants seemed to be confined to one little corner and weren’t too numerous (for fire ants) and I was able to complete the harvest and subsequent peanut planting with only one or two stings, so that is a win!

I didn’t particularly want to wet the soil or wait around a day for the detergent cure, so I just tried to keep out of the way of the ants. If I know where the ants are, it’s been easier to avoid them. Fire ants seem to love the potato patch most of all the beds.

Surprisingly, fire ants have only been a very minor nuisance in my garden. Most raised beds, they largely leave alone. They don’t seem like my leaf mulch very much.They like the potatoes (those don’t get any mulch) and they get around the cement pavers on the original in the ground bed and occasionally move into a bamboo support stake. Around the pavers, I’ll take a shovel and scoop up the bed and dump it all into the lake. After a couple of times of that, they tend to move on. I’ll leave them be in the bamboo stakes. Maybe they will eat some noxious caterpillars or something.

[karstopography]

B410A5F1-8586-4B02-8F64-8F851A71F415.jpeg

F3A9989A-BE9C-4F5B-806F-85EAF4582B70.jpeg

4A07A7DF-32F1-4A24-8678-B02F7E26FF1A.jpeg

First new potato dig of 2023. Red pontiac planted 2/4/2023. Spot never had potatoes before or much of anything other than a few fava beans that froze last December.

57E9ADD7-3936-4312-9507-1F6AA64115E7.jpeg

[PlainJane]

Pretty nice! They are so good.

[JRinPA]

Yours are farther along than the ones here which were planted March 11. It's almost time to start watching for the danged Colorado potato beetles. They show up here around mid-late April. Last year the first one was noticed on April 29 but fortunately last year there weren't many at all. Go figure.

I saw my first false colorado potato beetle today. I turned the comm garden year old compost yesterday and laid a plastic tarp over it. The bugger was on the underside of the tarp today. They are a handsome bug, shame they are destructive. I've only really noticed them on my eggplant.

Some of my potatoes are already up. It has not rained a bit since I planted. These were the potatoes with the long sprouts that some say are no good for planting. I left them intact, same as last year. I also had some left over that I broke off the long sprouts and put under the grow lights. Those are busy forming chits on the bottom. I'll probably plant them too, somewhere, to compare yield and potato size.

Those reds look good. I grow all Lehigh, a yellow. They taste great, and were bred for this area. My brother likes red potatoes, but to me...other than soup, or ham and green beans, they just don't seem right. They look good in someone else's bowl, though.

[karstopography]

We cooked these with some fresh picked flat podded green and wax beans, sweet yellow onion fresh from the garden, then bacon. They were so good and we get to have them all again at lunch today.

I like the flavor and texture of red potatoes. They are good in soups and stews. They make a great potato salad. They are also very good roasted in the oven. I actually love red potatoes mashed with the skins on. They have such a light and creamy texture that’s very different from the more starchy types.

I’ve also got a bed of white Kennebec potatoes that are flowering. Whatever potatoes I get in that bed at least some of them will be fried.

[GoDawgs]

My Kennebecs aren't flowering yet but you've had warmer weather than ours so that makes sense.

[karstopography]

195D2107-6A79-4403-9684-1D749DF073C2.jpeg

1A47EDEC-77C5-4BB7-86C4-B3A8D2C436F7.jpeg

Dug up 2#11oz of red pontiac this morning for supper and ahead of the rain on the way. Super pleased with this virgin potato patch.

[JRinPA]

My first sprouts got zapped a bit but my rows are looking pretty good now. We actually had near an inch of rain on Saturday night. Before that, only a quarter inch since Apr 1st.

I still haven't put in the last bunch.

[karstopography]

FullSizeRender.jpeg

I dug up all my Red Pontiac potatoes today. Plants were yellowed up, already planted the open area with spanish peanuts.

FullSizeRender.jpeg

[Danny]

karstopography, what is the plant with the 4 jagged leaves in the front center of the last picture ? It sort of looks like a cardoon or artichoke to me, but you get to grow so much we can't up here.

[karstopography]

karstopography, what is the plant with the 4 jagged leaves in the front center of the last picture ? It sort of looks like a cardoon or artichoke to me, but you get to grow so much we can't up here.

Cardoon. I started seed in September/October 2022. planted out in fall 2022, it got to 18 degrees December 23rd, thought Cardoon was frozen and dead, but there was a resurrection in the early in the spring under the potatoes, potatoes dug up, peanuts planted, cardoon remains.