Dig Your Biggest Potato Harvest Yet This Year With These

Planting sprouting kitchen potatoes works right up until it imports scab or blight that lives in the bed for years - grocery spuds are neither disease-certified nor variety-suited to your season. Certified seed stock is inspected clean, and five pounds plants a row that returns forty to sixty pounds by fall.

Chit them - sprout in egg cartons in light for two weeks - for a ten-day head start.

Fabric bags grow real potato harvests on a patio or driveway - ten gallons of loose compost, three seed potatoes, top up as they grow. The harvest flap is the honest killer feature: lift it and rob new potatoes in July while the plant keeps growing the main crop above.

Bags dry out fast - the bag crop is a watering commitment the bed crop is not.

Tubers form along buried stem, so every hilling - dragging soil up around the plants at six inches and again at twelve - literally adds a storey to the harvest and keeps the top layer from greening in sunlight. The warren hoe's pointed head pulls a ridge in one pass instead of the flat hoe's four.

Green potatoes are solanine - hill deep, and discard any that surface.

Potato harvest comes out of the ground wearing it, and a solid basket means washing the crop in the kitchen sink like an apology. The wire-bottomed hod hoses off the whole load in the yard in ten seconds - dirt stays outside, and the same hod carries every muddy harvest after.

Dry them dirty-ish in the dark, brush later - washed potatoes store worse.

The root-cellar page's sacks are the potato's finish line: cured two weeks in the dark, then bagged in breathing burlap somewhere cold, a good maincrop harvest feeds the kitchen till April. The circle from seed sack to storage sack is the most calories this whole site's gardening produces.

Check monthly and pull sprouters first - one gone-soft spud preaches.