How to grow potatoes?

Where do you live? I grow potatoes in the spring/summer. We plant about 45 plants. It really depends on hot hot it is where you are. I wouldn't water if the dirt looks wet or muddy like. Once they start coming through the groun they will grow fast. They get kind of big abd bushy. Where I live we have whats called potatoe bettles. They are a black stripped bettle that eats the new growth. You will want to spray or pick these bettles off. They will kill your plant if you don't catch it early. They will also lay little bitty orange eggs on the under sides of the leaves. After they are big and bushy they will flower. The flower is white. I have been told that after they flower you can go ahead and dig new potatoes. they will be golf ball size to a little smaller. I usually did a few of them. They I let the plants go and they dig potatoes when ever we are going to have them for a meal. Then at the end of the season i will go in and one by one dig the plant up and pick the spuds. Good Luck

Did you use "seed potatoes" or were they some store bought that sprouted on you? As I understand it, store bought won't work out too good. We buy seed potatoes in the spring from a farm and home store. After we get them home we cut them up into pieces with 2 or 3 eyes per piece, and set them out in the sun to dry or scab up. Usually a day or two. We till our rows, remove the dirt to one side till we have an open ditch. Then we put down a layer of manure,cover that with a layer of soil and put our potatoe pieces down the row 12" to 18" apart. Cover with 2" to 3" of soil. Water lightly and wait 2 to 3 days before watering again. Depending on your weather. Pretty soon you'll see sprouts coming up. When they get up a few inches we throw dirt on them from the side of the ditch till they're almost covered. We keep doing that till we run out of dirt. It's called "hilling". As they grow they'll need more and more water,but don't get carried away! If they get and stay too wet they'll rot in the ground. Depending on what you planted you'll have white or red flowers, or both. And yeah, potatoe beetles are a problem. We plant here in the Ozarks late Mar. to early Apr. and start taking potatoes well after they've flowered which is in late June. I think. Good luck and happy gardening!

On year when we lived in Kansas because of army we grew some potatoes in straw. We put down a nice bed of straw then we asread out the potatoes (kennbeck was the breed They were the best I had ever eaten.) We then covered the potatoes with strw nad kept adding some for a few layers. when we harvested the potatoes They were nice and clean. and we could start harvesting when they were young. as the season wearon the straw can be used for compost the nest year too.

I have also heard of people planting a potato plant in a stack of tires. I think this is how it goes. Have a small mound of nice soil and put your see potato in it and cover it up. When it starts to come up out of hte ground lay a tire down over it. and put more soil around the plant. As the plant grow and gets a little taller put another tire on top of the first tire. Again, add more soil. Do this till you have either 3 or 4 tires tacked on top of each other. Then once you stop doing that and let the plant grow and bloom you can start slowly removing the tires and you will be able to dig your potatoes real easy. I think this is how it goes. I might be wrong, it was a long time ago when I heard that it can be done this way. Good Luck

I tried potatoes once and it was quite interesting. You are probably watering enough. You can increase the water as soon as you see the sprouts breaking thru the surface of the ground. I had no idea when they were "ready" either so a couple of times I dug around "checking"... (I'm impatient, lol). One thing I had a hard time with though as when I finally dug them up I accidently cut a few of them in half trying to find them. All in all I decided that it was much cheaper to buy them in the store in a bag than have to go to the garden, dig them up and wash them off. It was a good experience though. Good luck.