What happens when the food supply chain slows to a crawl? What happens when the money supply tightens up by under-employment and food is plentiful, but cash is not? Americans are not accustomed to thinking this way and those who do think this way are considered a bit weird.
If you know the history, the Great Depression of 1929 came along like a runaway train that took two years to finish its ruinous run. The depression broke most national supply chains, removed most of the cash from the local economy, and forced many people from their homes. People got through it, but the going was hard . Those stronger American people soon faced a World War well prepared for deprivation and sacrifice.
In the worst case, the coming of the COVID19 pandemic may well become Americans facing a similar economic disaster as in the 1930s, this time with worldwide supply chain disruptions (coming without national or local substitutes), and all that may come with it. The possibility of a completely broken economy makes for a good opportunity to revisit the idea of the Victory Garden.
I can't write one simple article describing the Victory Garden and how it works. But whether you are in an apartment or have a few acres, you ought to be thinking about growing some food. When it comes to super cheap foods, things that are easy to plant, grow without tending, and have dozens of ways to prepare, it is hard to do better than to plant potatoes. Most people simply don't think about this simple thing.
Many people have something of a garden, well tended or not. Some intrepid city people have a garden patch. The central production of most gardens is the tomato, a few cucumbers, some zucchini, maybe some corn if space permits it. And most are very happy to get a few side dishes out of all the work and expense. Gardening work is mostly recreational, not nutritional. Something of a luxury. When times get tough, the gardens they make are usually our of season. The Victory Garden is different. It products food the whole year around. It encourages canning of seasonal things for use in Winter and produces storage items that last well out of the season when they are produced. The chief difference between a home vegetable garden and a Victory Garden is the idea that you can produce a year's supply of some foods using just a few hours of time, a few times a year.
Potatoes don't care if you weed them or not. The plants will grow in terrible soil too They need no fertilizer, water, or pesticides and the results can still be very good. Potatoes and onions are about as simple as growing marijuana plants. They come up and do the job. If you want a better "pot", or "spud", you do a little bit more and you get a little bit better. But both plants are pretty low effort.
In the comments section following this introduction you will find a number of different ways to do the work of growing potatoes. I will also show you how to put onions in with them and double your pleasure. So read on and get going with growing potatoes. It will be good for your health, if not your wealth.
The basic set of information you need to know, so that you can successfully grow a bag of potatoes for next Winter is small and usually pretty fool proof.
- The first truth about growing potatoes is that there a gardening snobs out there who will tell you all sorts of things which are academically true, but not required to succeed at some level. You needn't be academically correct, just correct enough to get things growing.
- The second truth about growing potatoes is that if you make a hole in something resembling the ground, put a Seed Potato into the hole and cover it up, you will probably get more potato out of the hole than you put into it. It's really just this simple.
- The third truth is that nearly every potato on earth is a "clone" of some other potato. It came directly from an ancestor of the potato and not a seed. There are "Potato Seeds", but most potatoes are grown from "Seed Potatoes" and there is a difference.
These three truths are self evident and need no other explanation. No matter how bad you are at gardening, no matter how bad the soil, you will likely have some measure of success if you follow just a few rules about "Seed Potatoes".
- The first rule is that not all "cloned" potatoes grow new potato plants. The big growers you find producing for grocery stores often spray them with a solution which stops "eye" development. "Eyes" are new potato plants and you need viable eyes to make new plants. Look into farmer's markets and organic section of the grocery store to find spuds that haven't been told not to grow.
- The second rule is that any potato "eye" is an individual plant, so one old potato in your pantry may have eight or more new plants looking for dirt to grow in.
- The third rule is that once you have grown one of the "eyes" to maturity you will find in the harvest some potatoes which are too small to eat. These will be seed potatoes in next year's garden.
If all you do is take these truths and find some Seed Potatoes, then put them into dirt, you will probably succeed is growing more potatoes than you planted. You can end your reading here ,or you can keep going. I promise that if you take the time to finish this article, you will find a means of doing very well at this.
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| How potatoes grow is really simple. |
The Dirt and the Light.
The chief difference between growing some potatoes, and growing a large amount of them is the dirt and the light. There is a large body of science out there, but for the most part you can forego most of it in favor of this simple string of ideas: Potato plants store energy derived from converting water into basic sugars which are stored up in new potatoes for making more potato plants next year. Potatoes store their own food source much the same as eggs tore what baby birds need to grow until hatching. Sunshine provides the energy to allow the plant to take the water in and process it into new potatoes. If you give the potato plant soil, you get a good enough harvest. No more science is needed.The fruit of the Potato plant is not very nutritious, it is merely an energy reserve consisting mostly of sugars. So any soil nutrients are mainly used by the plant to make roots, stems, and leaves which produce new potatoes. More roots, stems, and leaves usually increase the amount and size of the potato fruits coming out of the ground. This means that putting a bunch of fertilizer on the plants may not increase your harvest. Putting the spuds in the right soil is the real key to bigger harvests.
The number of potatoes you will pull out of the ground can be enormous, but the size of each potato is more a matter of time and type of seed potato you plant. If you like cute little potatoes you can dig nearly any of them up in July and they will be small. If you like them bigger you can leave them in the ground until November. But if you want a really large baking potato sitting next to your steak (or whatever) then it will be the type of potato you plant that gets you what you want. No matter the type of spud you want to get out of the dirt, it is the dirt which you need to make it all come together. And dirt is very simple.
Whatever dirt you have, there are three things in it which make it suitable for growing things.
- There is clay which soaks up and releases water. No matter your dirt, you have enough clay. But clay is not at all necessary for growing potatoes. (I'll explain this later.)
- There is usually sand in your dirt. These are little pieces of decomposed rock which breaks up the clay and allows roots to develop in the air gaps that exist around each individual grain of sand. If you have clay soils more suitable for pottery than growing things you might want to add some sand. If you want to add sand, make sure it isn't "beach" sand you get at the hardware or home improvement store because it comes with salt from the ocean and salt is bad for plants. If you have any question about whether there is salt in the sand you bought, simply rinse the sand out with clear water and this ought to take care of it.
- There is usually some sort of plant material in dirt which rots away and leaves space for air and releasing nutrients and water. There simply is no way to have too much organic material in the mix. You can grow potatoes in a mix of one-hundred percent organic material and it works very well so long as the material is in the process of rotting.
The light the plant receives is definitely more important than the soils you plant in. Potatoes love the light. So spacing your plants properly, and putting them where the sunshine is, is probably the most important thing you will need to do if you want better results. A bit down the page from this are a few different ways to plant, but all of them will need you to space your plants at least eighteen inches apart (the size of an adult plant) and in as much sun as you have. Potatoes grow in shade, but better in the light.
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| Plant anatomy. The young tuber is Seed Potato for next year |
Picking your Seed Potatoes.
You can find Seed Potatoes nearly everywhere you can buy potatoes. So long as they can develop "eyes" they will grow into potato plants. In late Winter many grocery stores sell Seed Potatoes. Plant and farm stores often sell these same seed potatoes, as do home and garden centers. But it is also possible to buy suitable spuds at farmers markets and the organic produce bins at most grocery stores. You should bear in mind that many large producers of potatoes spray them with a hormone which retards "eye" development, making them more suitable for the plate than the garden. You might also have a friend or acquaintance who has some left overs from their own garden. Seed Potatoes are everywhere if you are looking for them. But not all potatoes are the same and I encourage you to try them all. Here are a few that we grow in Zone 8, but nearly all potatoes will grow in all zones.The Russet Burbank is the potato most people think of when thinking Idaho Spud. A dull brown, rough, large-ish, baker which was once the main stay of potatoes in America. It is clunky and hard to find seed potato since it is usually grown by large commercial growers. It is a good, cheap, potato thing. If you go past the idea of growing it your world will open up the better flavors and textures.
The Pontiac Red (Baby Red) is what most people think of as an up-scale restaurant potato. These are much more common today than in the last century. It is smooth and creamy, but shares the Burbank flavor profile.
The Purple Viking is a newer addition to the line up of what's good out there. It has a purple skin, but a white flesh which is wonderfully suitable for mashing. The flavor is wonderful, the texture a bit grainy when over-cooked. It doesn't make a great fried potato, but so what, grow another variety and fry it. Not really a baking potato.
The German Butterball is the best thing to replace the Burbank in our garden. It can get quite large, so makes a great baking potato. It has a wonderful flavor profile depending on preparation. It fries, boils, and bakes. My favorite overall potato.
The Yukon Gold is often thought of as extra fancy, but the flavor is striking and so it make an okay fry, but a bad baker. Boiling does this variety no good at all since it easily overcooks and can become mushy. I've never grown one.
Another great variety is the Kennebec. The best tasting masher out there. Pure white flesh which doesn't easily become grainy in cooking. A distinctive flavor and a good range of sizes when harvested. This one is recommended.
There are a great many choices out there to try. My advice is to try them all and find what suits you best. For us it is the Butterball for general use as fries or bakers, the Pontiac for early harvest boiling and soups, and the Kennebec for mashing. But we try them all and trade seed potatoes with our friends. There are an infinite number of types, colors, and shapes. Try all of them.
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| These are the types available in Peru. I'm told that, if you grow from potato seed, you'll get one of these varieties. |
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| The varieties we grow are not so adventurous. They are all from seed potatoes. |
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| Raised beds make for great ground if you wish to make new soils, but potatoes aren't very picky. |
So long as the plant gets some place to put down fully covered roots you will get potatoes. In this part I'll look at just a few, but it is not hard to think of others. . .
The first is row planting in dirt. Dig, mound up the dirt into rows about ten inches deep, and plant eighteen inches apart. Or you can plant in round mounds with onions and corn. Squash works well too. The plants grow together very well.
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| If your soil is deep, trenching is enough. We often use a bulb planter to put them in. This guy likes a lot of space between plants. |
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| Single raised rows is better for digging when the soils are shallow. |
Weeding a potato row really isn't much of a problem since potatoes usually choke off the light available for weeds and use nitrogen available for leaf growth. Potatoes need some nitrogen, but only on the surface, so mulching with straw acts to add some slow release nitrogen while blocking off light to weed seeds. Weeding between rows is a good idea. Potato plants stay of a certain size and are distinctive from other plants.
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| Messy or not. Potatoes don't care. |
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| A modified Ruth Stout tower |
The Ruth Stout Method uses no digging, and no dirt. You simply put down a weed barrier (some use old cardboard), distribute about eight inches of straw on the barrier in late Fall to Winter over and decompose a bit, then plant under the straw in early Spring and cover with a fresh layer of straw. You have to plan for this, but you don't even water the plants since the old straw carries the water to the roots. There are a great many ways to do this and we are trying a few of them this year.
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| No dig potatoes sound sexy. |
There are many types of containers you can grow potatoes in. Anything from a feed sack to a bucket especially built for the task will work quite well. Just make sure that excess water drains away and the potato fruits themselves see no sunlight at all. Green potatoes are those which have seen sunlight. They are not suitable for eating. If you find a green potato, cover it with mulch and the green may fade away.
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| This is a type of bucket where you can harvest any time you wish. |
And bags work well too. Some use old feed sacks, some use pant legs of old blue jeans tied off at the bottom. Literally any planter will do. So creativity abounds.
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| So long as the soils are drained of excess water, potatoes will grow. |
Harvesting and storage
If your soils are sufficiently sandy, or the rains not too heavy, you might over-Winter the fruit in the ground where they grew and harvest them when you want to use them. These fruits will grow in the Spring and become a riot of bad gardening so get them all out before the late Winter. But you can do it this way should you want.
Harvesting potatoes takes no special tools, nothing tricky in method. You dig under the plant, sift through the dirt carefully for potato fruits, and let them sit in between the rows for a day to allow the skins to dry. If you planted them in any particular order, sorting them out is unnecessary. You can sort them for size if you wish. We usually sort out next year's seed potatoes before storage and put them in paper sacks marked with their variety to make planting rows easier in Spring. Try to get all of the fruits out of the dirt or you'll have volunteers sprouting everywhere next Spring.
Storing potatoes is simply a matter of keeping them cool and dry. Don't wash them until you are ready to use them. This keep the interior moist and the exterior dry and doesn't promote early growth. We put them in open buckets and out in the shed where rodents can't get to them. You might put them in paper sacks or plastic trays, but refrigeration isn't necessary. Avoid plastic bags or sealing the potatoes away from fresh air circulation. When dried after harvest they should last the Winter and Spring. In Spring we bring the seed potato sacks into the house so that they can warm and develop eyes. The rest are destined for the kitchen and, so long as they are kept cool, dry, and in darkness, will be usable the rest of the year.
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