How To Plant Seed Potatoes In The Garden

Learning when and how to plant seed potatoes in the garden is an important step in growing the food to fill your pantry. Potatoes are a staple food for our family. They are so easy to cook and can be prepared many different ways. Hashbrowns, fried potatoes, baked potatoes, cheesy potatoes, mashed potatoes, potato salad and smashed potatoes are just a few ways that come to mind.
I love growing potatoes because after digging them in the fall, they can be stored for many months in a cool dark place like my homestead pantry without having to can or freeze them. So much of what we grow has to be preserved in some way, and potatoes can be kept for quite awhile without any special storage preparation. We do can some of the small potatoes every fall so that we have some already cooked potatoes in our pantry for quick and easy meals. But for the most part we store them just like they are when they come out of the ground.
Plant In Early Spring
Potatoes like to grow when it is cool outside, so it’s a good idea to plant them in the early spring. You can find out when it’s safe to plant them in your growing zone by looking up your last frost date on the Old Farmers Almanac website. Then put that last frost date into a garden planning tool called Seedtime. This will show you when it is best to plant each crop outdoors, and whether they should be started indoors first, or direct seeded into the garden. In the case of potatoes, they are always direct seeded into the garden. The great thing about potatoes is that they can handle a light frost, so you can plant them out into the garden earlier than some other crops like tomatoes or cucumbers.

Get Your Kids Involved
Planting potatoes is a great time to get your kids involved in the gardening process. There really isn’t anything they can hurt when it comes to planting potatoes. The seeds are large and the spacing doesn’t have to be exact. I tell the kids to use their feet to figure out how much space to put between each seed potato. That’s usually about 6-8”, depending on the size of their feet of course. Also, after the kids get done putting the seed potatoes into the ground, you can easily walk down the row and make sure that they didn’t double up on potatoes, or miss any spots. There’s not very many things that we plant in the garden where the seeds are this large.

Seed Potatoes
The seed for growing potatoes is simply the potato itself. All potatoes have “eyes” which are the little indentations in the potato where they will sprout. If you’ve ever forgotton some potatoes in your pantry for too long, you’ll notice that they start to sprout. When you plant a potato, those sprouts grow into the foliage for the new potato plant, and underground the plant develops more potatoes. Seed potatoes can either be leftover from last years garden, purchased from seed catalogs, or from your local hardware store. When choosing seed potatoes, it is best to choose large healthy potatoes. You can plant the smaller shriveled up sprouted potatoes leftover in your pantry, but they might not produce very big potatoes. For nice big healthy potatoes, use high-quality healthy seed potatoes.

FAQ


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How To Plant Seed Potatoes In The Garden
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Put your potatoes in a warm dark place until they start to sprout. Then bring them out into the light a couple of weeks before planting so the sprouts can grow a little longer. This makes it easier to see all the eyes before cutting apart the potatoes, and gives them a head start on being ready to grow in the garden.
Cut Your Seed Potatoes
Cut your seed potatoes into sections so each piece of potato only has one eye. You can do this ahead of time, and allow the cuts to heal for a day or two, or you can plant them right away.

Plant In Rows
Potatoes grow best in a row. If you are growing on 30” wide beds, which is what I recommend in my garden planning tutorial, then you will want to plant one row down the middles of a 30” wide bed.
Run a string line between two stakes to make sure your row is straight. If you don’t have a string line, just know that you can fit more potatoes in a crooked row than a straight row, so it’ll still be fine. We plow our potatoes out with a tractor, so my husband prefers to drive down a straight row when it’s time to plow them out. Hence my use of the string line. It’s always a good idea to make working together with your spouse easier by not asking them to plow potatoes out of a crooked row 🙂
Dig A Trench And Plant Potatoes
Dig a trench all along the string line with a hoe about 4-6 inches deep.
Lay the cut seed potatoes into the trench about every 6-12”. You don’t have to be super particular about the spacing. Just eyeball it.

Cover Potatoes
Using a rake or a hoe, pull the dirt back over the trench to cover the seed potatoes. It’s best to cover them with 4-6 inches of soil.
Water Well
Keep the soil moist until the potatoes start to grow. This can take 2-3 weeks depending on your soil temperature and weather conditions. I typically don’t water my potatoes until later in the spring because we usually get occasional rains in the spring time and the weather isn’t hot enough to dry out the soil quickly.
And that’s all there is to planting seed potatoes. Potatoes are fun, easy and rewarding to grow, and growing a lot of them gives you a greater sense of food security for the coming winter. Growing potatoes will also make a big dent in your grocery bill, not to mention that they are healthier for you than store-bought potatoes as well.
I hope you try growing your own potatoes, and let me know in the comments below which potatoes you’re growing and any questions you may have.
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