How to Plant Potatoes! 🥔🌿 // Garden Answer

hey guys how's it goin Laura with garden dancer today I want to walk you through the process of planting potatoes it's really easy and it's actually one of my favorite vegetables to plant because everything happens underground so you really don't know what you're gonna get until you go

into harvest and now is a perfect time to get them in the ground they like to be planted in the cool spring temperatures so the first step is finding a spot that receives a lot of sunlight so at least six to eight hours preferably all day Sun if

you can swing that this is the raised bed where I'm planting mine and it does get all day Sun the second step is to make sure your soil is the right consistency potatoes like light and fluffy soil because they form their tubers or potatoes underground they need a

room in order to grow and expand and to form nice big large potatoes so you want to take your digging fork or your shovel and just work your soil up really nicely if you have really heavy clay soil I would recommend especially if you're planting potatoes to garden

and raised beds that way you can control what kind of soil you have in there and you won't deal with that heaviness the third step is to add a starter fertilizer to your soil potatoes do like fertile soil so while you're in there working off the soil it's

a great time to add some in I'm using the s Poma organic biotin sprinkling it over the top and working it in with my hands potatoes do like a pH between about five and six but they're fairly adaptable and should produce a pretty good crop for you however

if you have really high alkaline soil it's a good idea to add in some sulfur into your soil to bring that pH down a little bit and the potatoes will do that much better step number five is to prep the potatoes so if you look at the potatoes

you can see these little sprouts coming out those are called eyes so if you have smaller potatoes like say this size right here you can just go ahead and plant them whole there's just one eye on this potato but if you've got larger potatoes with several eyes you

can cut the potatoes in pieces like I've done here and then you want to let them dry for maybe a day or two before you plant them that way that cut part can heal over and it helps prevent rot so we just want to make sure there's at

least one or two good eyes on each piece step number six is to plant so here's how I do it I dig trenches about four to six inches deep and then I place the potatoes iced facing up about every eight to twelve inches I plant them closer together

in raised bed situations and a little bit further apart when they're in rows just keep in mind that more space equals more room for your potatoes to grow a little bit larger so then I'm going to go ahead and fill the trench in and in the end it

should resemble pretty much the way it looked when we started planting this raised bed is three feet wide by six feet long and I was able to do three trenches in fit 21 potatoes in here total so that should give me a pretty nice harvest here and just

like maybe about three or so months I planted the variety called Yukon Gold which I'm sure you're familiar with and they take about a hundred days to mature so once the plants are about eight to ten inches tall I'll go in and kind of draw some of the

soil from the sides around the plant and Hill it up around or mound the soil up around the base of the plant and that helps keep the plant a little bit cooler some longer season varieties of potatoes or indeterminate type potatoes might even produce a few more tubers

if held up making them a little bit better choice over the shorter season potatoes or determinate varieties for vertical gardening although I've had pretty mixed results with vertical potato gardening I found I get the best results just planting them traditionally in the ground the seventh step is to

water and potatoes do like to be consistently watered especially during their flowering stage because that's when they're producing their tubers so keep your eyes out during that time I usually give mine a deep soak about once or twice a week during the hottest part of the summer I

just like to make sure that the top one or two inches of soil dries out between waterings so it might vary for you depending on your soil type and what climate you live in if you live in a more mild climate you mean off to water is often

of course this time of year when it's springtime it's a lot cooler I you might be able to go ten to fourteen days between watering I just keep my eyes on the consistency of the soil make sure it doesn't stay too wet because I don't want them to

rot this bed is actually going to eventually be hooked up to a drip system I'm hoping in the next couple of weeks we've got a faucet in the corner here and we will do a video explaining all the details but basically what it is there's a an adapter

you can screw on to the faucet which attaches to drip tubing which I can run in this bed so that's all there is to planting potatoes it's pretty simple harvesting is really easy as well the plants will tell you when it's time to harvest usually they'll start to

yellow and kind of fall over and die back and then you'll know but of course I know that these Yukon Gold potatoes are 100 day potatoes so I should expect in about a hundred days to be able to harvest so that's a really good indicator to ready to

write on the calendar so I could be watching for it so that's it you guys thanks so much for watching this video and we will see you in the next one bye [Music]