Got 'Taters!!!

[digitS']

Thank you for that information, Jim!

Mary, you probably can. Just be sure that they are organic. That way they will not have been treated with sprout inhibitors.

Non-certified is a little risky on the disease front but there are gardeners who use them all the time.

Steve

 

[vfem]

Wow... you got my taters beat 10 ways from Sunday!!! NICE HAUL!!!

 

[thistlebloom]

Mary, what Steve said.

 

[retiredwith4acres]

We are digging today! Our harvest is not as good as last year because of the triple digit temps. We should have dug them two weeks ago. We are a little more than half finished and have 3 crates full. We are throwing away several that are black from the heat I suppose and some are even rotting. Big potatoes though! We will have plenty, but just not as many as years past. AND, that is just fine, I threw away too many last year.

I had never seen red Kennebec's either. That is what ours are but not red.

 

[JimWWhite]

Now someone's got me questioning what kind of potatoes we just harvested. I went online and I can't find anything called a Red Kennebeck or Red Kennebec or anything close to it. We dug up red potatoes. Some weigh close to a pound. Many are a half pound. I asked Teresa and she said she remembered buying them as Red Kennebecks. But looking through all the red potato cultivars on the internet I'm beginning to think they may actually be Red Pontiacs but that may be wrong too. The skins are light red and they have white flesh. They're large and firm. Anyone ideas?

 

[so lucky]

Are they a "mealy" potato or an "oily" one, when cooked? You know, how a good baking potato, like a regular Kennebec, is kind of fluffy, and red Pontiacs are ---well---kind of waxy textured.

 

[Smiles Jr.]

We're going to put in more in mid to late August but they'll probably be fingerling potatoes this time.

Please tell us where you are going to get seed potatoes at this time of the season. Are you going to use some of your latest harvest?

I would love to try for a late potato crop this year. I just harvested last night and my potatoes did not do well at all. Too hot???? I don't think I'm going to try the extra deep straw mulch method any more as this is the third year in a row with lousy results. Very small 'taters and very few. I always get better harvest with deep row planting with soil mounding.

 

[digitS']

. . . Are you going to use some of your latest harvest? . . .

I tried that one year, Smiles.

A question was first posted about doing this on a forum (that will go unnamed ). A gardener in Virginia assured me that it would work. I'd harvested the very earliest variety I had in July and replanted some of the tubers. The plants showed up the next spring .

There was another 2 months to the growing season. Jim is in North Carolina - conditions are different & probably a month or 2 could be added to that, further; he's got his potatoes out of the ground a couple weeks before I could that year.

I know that potatoes harvested in the summer can sprout in storage before the year is out .

Steve

 

[lesa]

This is something I am very interested in.... according to all the experts we should plant our potatoes in the early spring, which we do. However, I have tons of volunteer potatoes that have clearly been in the ground all winter. We are already eating them... So, it seems I could purposely plant them in the fall and have an early harvest. Dh is dying to try it- so we will take our tiny potatoes (common in the fingerlings, especially) and plant them in a row and see what happens!

 

[JimWWhite]

Now I know this will make the Pureists here grumble but honestly, last year I bought a five pound bag of fingerling potatoes from WallyWorld and Teresa set them in the pantry in an open box for a couple of months. It takes that long for the retardant they put on them to break down so they can start making eyes and sprout. Then I cut them into seeds, dusted them with sulphur and planted them in a raised-bed box in the garden about the last week in August. We had fresh roasted fingerling potatoes from the garden for Thanksgiving. I think I got the idea from Dick Raymond's Joy of Gardening book that I still have a copy of. Now all this reminds me that I need to pick up another bag this week so they'll be ready in time to plant next month.