240 All About Potatoes

Show Transcript

Garden Basics Ep. 240 ALL ABOUT POTATOES TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred  0:00

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

Farmer Fred

I find it amazing how one simple question opens the door for a podcast that turned out to be about an hour long. Today, here on episode 240, we delve into the world of potatoes. How to grow them, how to store them, and - the question that started all of this from a listener - what are the best potatoes to grow? We’re talking potatoes today - the most consumed vegetable throughout the world - with America’s Favorite Retired College horticulture professor, Debbie Flower; as well as Master Gardener and vegetable expert Gail Pothour.

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

Farmer Fred

We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast . There’s a lot of ways to get your questions in: you can give us a call, that always works. You can call or text us at 916-292-8964 or go to speak pipe.com/garden basics and leave us an audio question there. You can also email us at Fred at farmerfred.com or fill out the little question box at GardenBasics.net. A lot of ways to get your questions in, just like Alan, who writes us…oh, by the way “us” is me and Debbie Flower, who is here. She is celebrating her birthday today, as we record this. You have gardened since you were a small child.

Debbie Flower  2:02

Yes, one of my favorite things was to garden with my grandfather. When I was born, the first eight years of my life, I lived right next door to my grandparents. And they owned the lot next to us. And so we had a big garden and it was a wonderful time with a person I adored, so I have great memories.

Farmer Fred  2:21

And you keep on doing it.

Debbie Flower  2:22

I do. It keeps me sane.

Farmer Fred  2:26

Because plants don't talk back. Well, happy birthday to you.  Alan writes in and says, “What varieties of potatoes are best to grow here?” There are literally hundreds of potato types that would work in just about any portion of the country. Here in California, the University of California recommends varieties like Noragold, Rosette Red Lasoda, Kennebec and White Rose. I like Yukon Gold myself, but your local nurseries will carry the best seed potatoes for you to get. And you can buy seed potatoes from catalogs, too. And they'll be getting in and shipping out seed potato varieties such as Colorado Rose, Heirloom Russet Burbank, Purple Majesty, French Fingerling, and heirloom German butterball. in the wintertime is usually when they're mailed out and when nurseries get them, as well. I think one of the keys to homegrown potato success is planting at the right time to avoid frost damage to young plants. It's usually winter, early spring planting, I used the term, “seed potato”. What am I talking about?

Debbie Flower  3:35

It's not a seed, it's a piece of the potato. The potato is a stem, actually, I used to do this in class. You can take a potato and look for the eyes. The eyes are the nodes of potatoes, so places where stems and leaves would grow. And they go around the potato in a spiral. And at one end they’re growing and they're very close together. There's a whole bunch of them right there. And that's where if the potato stayed in the ground and kept growing, it would get bigger, it would grow out in that direction. And so I always usually start there and try to find a spiral and then you go around the stem and toward the other end of the potato, and you can draw a spiral on the potato.

Farmer Fred

That sounds like fun. With most of those eyes  along one end, would those be the ones that you would chop up and plant?

Debbie Flower  4:25

You can take any eyes. First of all, you buy certified seed potato from a reputable source. And that means it's certified to be disease free and to be the type of potato that it says it is to be the NorGold Russet or  the Kennebec or whatever. You don't want to plant ones that you buy at the grocery store. They are treated with chemicals to prevent them from sprouting; and sprouting is exactly what you want. And they may contain diseases. There are diseases that potatoes get that are bad for potatoes that we humans can eat and it doesn't harm us, but it harms the potato. And once you put that in your soil, your soil is contaminated. And I have seen those diseases on potatoes purchased at the grocery. The one most that comes to mind is a lot of black, almost sooty stuff on the potato. And that's a disease, a potato disease, and it's going to reduce your potato production. So don't risk it. Don't risk contaminating your soil forever. By buying something at the grocery store, go to your local reliable nursery, get certified seed potatoes, and what you're buying is potatoes. I've never seen them sold already cut, have you?

Farmer Fred  5:35

No, you've always had to buy a whole potato. And it should be, like you said, a seed potato. One thing I've heard and it's probably true that I do is: after cutting up the potatoes into one or two eyes per piece, let it sit out on the kitchen counter overnight to allow it to callus over because it might rot otherwise.

Debbie Flower  5:52

they contain a lot of water, they're very wet. And when you cut it, liquid oozes out, and that's a great place for microorganisms to grow there. Hopefully, if you have a healthy garden, there are lots of microorganisms in your soil. And if you put that wet uncured piece of potato in the ground, they'll just go right for it, and it'll rot in the ground. So yes, let it dry out on the counter for at least 24 hours.

Farmer Fred  6:16

So you want to use seed potatoes. And we get another question from Bill who writes in and asks, “What's wrong with using some of the potatoes from our earlier harvest to plant a new crop? Is there a difference between eating potatoes and seed potatoes?” And this goes back to your comment about transferring soil borne diseases,

Debbie Flower  6:33

Right. We’ve talked about crop rotation in the garden, you can build up diseases at a location in the garden, and you can move them from place to place, especially with something like a potato. And so each year, you start with certified disease-free seed potatoes, you're never introducing or increasing the presence of a disease that you maybe already have.

Farmer Fred  6:56

Seed potatoes are rather rigorously tested as well. They're certified disease free varieties and they are tested by inspectors. There's a lot of demanding potato criteria when it comes to growing seed potatoes. they're certified to be free of some diseases that can ravage an entire garden, like early blight, late blight, damping off, verticillium wilt, and nematodes, too. So why create problems by not using seed potato?  And that includes the ones that you might even grow yourself.

Debbie Flower  7:30

Exactly.

Farmer Fred  7:31

I think that's what led to the problems in Ireland way back when.

Debbie Flower  7:34

yes, the build up of the disease that caused crops to just totally fail and people to starve,

Farmer Fred  7:41

I guess one option to get around that would be if you wanted to grow it from your own potatoes, would be to grow them in containers. And that way, you wouldn't be passing on any soil borne diseases into your garden.

Debbie Flower  7:58

Right, but you would potentially be wasting media.

Farmer Fred  8:01

You would have to throw out the media, right. But for a lot of people, maybe a large container, 15 gallon container or larger, it might be the only way they can grow potatoes.

Debbie Flower  8:10

it's a wonderful way to grow potatoes. In fact, even given that I have soil available to grow potatoes in the ground, I might choose to do it in a container anyway because my experience is, once you have a potato patch, it's always a potato patch. Because something comes up every year. you never get every little tiny piece of potato stem out of the ground. And so it overwinters and it grows the next year and you've got more potatoes and more potatoes so having it in a container limits where those potatoes are.

Farmer Fred  8:43

I like to think of it as the Alstroemeria of the vegetable world. you can never get rid of it.

Debbie Flower  8:48

Growing in a container also allows you to control the texture of the soil and if you have clay soil or very rocky soil you might get some funny looking potatoes. but in a container with container media. It's going to be pretty open and easy for the potatoes to form nice shapes.

Farmer Fred  9:04

And containers  are easy to cover. You can throw a frost cloth over it , if when you planted it, you thought the weather would be fine in the future. but a sudden weird frost might come up. you can cover it with a frost cloth.

Debbie Flower  9:16

Yes. and  these potato pieces, as you said, are available in late winter and early spring, the certified disease free seed potatoes. and then they're planted four to six weeks before the last frost or the predicted last frost.

Farmer Fred  9:32

Isn't that a mystery now?

Debbie Flower  9:34

Good luck on that. for me it would be relevant here in California with relatively cool soils. so anything above freezing means you can work it . it's not frozen solid and up to about 70 degrees up to when you're going to be putting or have recently put in your other summer crops. So you're gonna dig a hole, a trench or hole, four to six inches deep and put that cured piece of certified disease free potato in there, and it must have an eye on it, that eye is a node. And that's where the new growth is going to grow from.

Farmer Fred  10:12

Should the eye be facing down or up? or doesn't matter?

Debbie Flower

it's not critical. a plant will figure it out.

Farmer Fred

unlike, say garlic, where yes, where you do want to plant root down. as that potato plant grows, and it emerges from the soil after you've planted it and covered it with a couple of inches of soil, I guess it's a good idea to put more soil on top of it.

Debbie Flower  10:33

Right. Because the potato  is your crop, what you want to harvest is the stem that grows underground. And so if you cover up the stem that's above ground, it will make new stems underground, and you'll have more potatoes.

Farmer Fred  10:45

And same is true with growing them in containers. start with a couple of inches of soil in the bottom, lay the seed potato pieces on the top, cover with two inches of soil. As the sprouts grow, repeat the process of covering until you're about within a couple of inches of the container top or so.

Debbie Flower  11:02

right. and then you will get a plant, it's a kind of a pretty plant, and it will flower. So they do flower and they can make seed. We don't use that in reproducing them. But they will do that . the whole crop is typically three to four months, from the time you plant your chunk of certified disease free seed potato to the time you're going to harvest. You can harvest the young ones, the little ones, when flowering has finished. And then you're going to wait till the plant itself has all turned yellow and looks horrible. And then you're going to harvest the rest of the potatoes.

Farmer Fred  11:42

And when you're harvesting, it's always a good idea to maybe dig with a spading fork instead of a shovel so you don't injure the potatoes because they're going to be scattered in a lot of different places, you can start digging well outside the canopy of the leaf. But dig straight down and sort of lift up that whole mass if you can.

Debbie Flower  12:03

And you want the soil to be relatively dry when you're digging, because especially if you want to keep the potatoes over a long period of time, store them somewhere, because you want them to be dry. So you take them out and just brush the soil off of them.

Farmer Fred  12:18

right. Don't wash them.

Debbie Flower  12:19

don't wash them, if you want to keep them. if you're gonna use them right away, you can wash them, but keep them dry. And then keep them in a dark, cool place. But first you have to lay them out and let them cure for how long?

Farmer Fred  12:33

“Let them rest so they they dry completely outdoors or in a warm area covering to avoid greening then store in a cool dark place.”  They don't know either.

Debbie Flower  12:42

Yeah, you want to let them dry. You don't want them to wrinkle,  during the cure, then you can put them into a cool dark place not touching each other.

Farmer Fred  12:51

If your potatoes start turning green, with green shoulders, you probably don't want to eat those.

Debbie Flower  12:55

Yeah, that's an indication that they're metabolically active and are able to make the chemicals that are natural to them, including solanine, which can be poisonous. In fact, we don't eat potatoes at my house because the solanine causes my husband's arthritis to be worse.

Farmer Fred  13:13

I'd never knew that could happen.

Debbie Flower  13:15

Oh, yeah, potatoes are the worst for him. Wow, he loves them. But they cause the symptoms fastest and the worst. But over time, we've been doing this for many, many years over time. He's been able to eat a little bit now. a little, you know, a few French fries, a couple of potato chips.

Farmer Fred  13:35

The University of California digs into the question, so to speak, of how long to let the potatoes cure. They say, “dig the potatoes up, allow them to dry and store in a cool dark place.”Everybody is a big help in this.

Debbie Flower  13:49

I'm not sure what allow them to dry means. I've never had enough that I've stored them for a very long time. Because I tend to plant too many things, too many different types of things. And so I don't  have a lot a lot of space for them.

Farmer Fred  14:02

I guess if you want big potatoes or healthier potatoes, and you see flowers, I guess you better cut off the flowers to send that energy to the potato.

Debbie Flower  14:10

yeah, flowers do take a lot of energy out of the plant. They don't make any food themselves. They use food. they're parasites off the rest of the plant. But you can get some really cool potatoes. You can get some such as Yukon Gold they kind of have a buttery flavor. And then there are purple ones and red ones and some just have purple skin and red skin. And in some of them when you boil them, the color of the skin changes to tan. Some of them though, are purple and red all the way through. It's lots of fun and it's fun to make potato salad with different colored potatoes.

Farmer Fred  14:45

Some purple varieties include Heirloom Viking, and Heirloom Purple Majesty. Those are nice ones. Red ones include Colorado Rose, Dark Red Norland, and French fingerling. That is kind of interesting. It's sort of a small potato. They almost look like one potato would make about four French fries.

Debbie Flower  15:03

Yeah, the fingerlings tend to be long, more French fry-shaped, long and thin. I was reading somewhere that the potatoes we buy at the grocery store have been very much influenced by what the fast food restaurants want. They want a certain size, a certain quality to the flesh, because they use them strictly for French fries. So there's a lot more to the potato world than what we experience by just buying at the grocery store.

Farmer Fred  15:30

Idaho would cease to exist without fast food. Potatoes are king. All right, a lot of good potatoes out there. Try some try some heirloom kinds. Try some ones that you see at your local nursery as well and again, the nursery will stock them when it's time to plant. it's a little confusing here in California because in our area we have two potato planting seasons. One season is December through March and then we have a summer planting schedule for potatoes here in August and September. So if you miss the  August September planting, do it in the winter.

Debbie Flower  16:04

Right. We have a long growing season here. Good luck to Alan.

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ALL ABOUT POTATOES WITH GAIL, PART 1

Farmer Fred

If you listened to what Debbie and I were just chatting about when it comes to potatoes, you know we had two unanswered questions. How long do you cure potatoes?  we couldn't find a good answer. And the other, Should you snip off the potato flowers in order to send that energy back underground and make those potatoes that are growing down there get even bigger? To get those answers, we turn to our potato expert our vegetable expert, Sacramento County Master Gardener Gail Pothour. She knows her vegetables. And Gail, regarding curing and snipping, what's a potato gardener to do?

Gail Pothour  18:55

Somebody could be some added chores you don't necessarily need. Talking about the cutting off the potato flowers: That is something that never occurred to me to do. So I did some research and I have found that you probably don't need to do it. You can do it if you want. It may not make any difference. What I find interesting is all the university sites that I had been on in states where they grow a lot of potatoes like Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, a lot of states where they grow a lot of potatoes, all their university publications on growing potatoes never mentioned cutting off the flowers. But there's articles on the internet. You can find a lot of things on the internet . It actually talked about this and some of them were gardeners. one of them was a gardener in the UK. And he asked that very question. and so he did one of his own experiments. He had half of his bed of potatoes. The same potato variety. he pinched off the flowers on one half. and the other half, he didn’t. and the yield? there wasn't much difference at all. And then he cited a couple of studies that I since looked up. One was done a number of years ago at the University of Minnesota. And their conclusion was, yeah, there could be an increase in yield. And then there was another study he cited from Canada that said, No, there wasn't much difference. So I think the jury's still out on  whether or not this is beneficial. It probably doesn't reduce the yield. But whether or not increases it it, I don't know. that could be kind of a fun experiment, if someone wanted to try that in your own garden, they could grow the same variety of potatoes, half of them you’d take the flowers off, and the other half don't . see if there's any difference. Some plants, after they flower, if they happen to get pollinated, could develop what's called a berry, it looks like a little green tomato. And there are seeds inside of that those. Those seeds are only really used by breeders. So it's not worth keeping, you might want to pick those off. Because if you have children or grandchildren around, that could be a temptation for them to eat that, and that is toxic. So certainly, you might want to take those berries off. But I've found in all my years of growing potatoes, some plants never have flowers, which means they'll never have berries, and some that do flower and have berries, they're not very many.  I may only have one or two plants that have  berries. so I don't think you're going to have a lot of them. But you might want to take the berries off. But do the experiment. See if it works, you know, for you, if you have a difference in yield.

Farmer Fred  21:43

By the way, for new gardeners. Don't confuse the edible potato plant with the potato vine. The potato vine is an ornamental plant that just happens to have the name potato in it, you're not gonna get potatoes on it. Now curing potatoes, why do we need to cure a potato, what is curing?

Gail Pothour  21:59

when the potato gets to its mature length, its mature age, the skin on the potato will start to toughen up. And before it reaches that point, the skin can slip off easily. think of the potato as it's a stem, a stolon or stem that has bark on it, like the stem of a tree has bark on it. The trunk and the stems of trees have have bark on it kind of similar on a potato. This is a bit of a stretch. But I mean, it's similar to that. And the skin of the potato, until it reaches maturity, is real thin. It's respirating. It gets very complicated about the cell structure and all that, but it easily will slip off. When you cure the potato, it's now ready to harvest. So you cut off the irrigation, and cut off the plant at the soil level. We like to put a little bit of straw on top of it so that any potatoes that might be close to the surface or kind of sticking out the surface won't get exposed to sunlight, that causes greening, which is a little toxic. And we can talk about that later. But kind of cover it with a little bit of mulch and turn off the irrigation and leave them in the ground for about 10 days, two weeks. Then after that period of time root around in there, pull out a potato and see if the skin is getting rougher, maybe not barky looking, but it will be look rough. If you rub it with your thumb, the skin won't slip off. If it does still slip off, leave them in the ground for a couple more days. Try it again. So what you're doing is you're letting the skin toughen up so that the potato can then be stored long term, as some varieties store longer than others. some only a few months, some you know, four or five months. But that toughened skin will let it store longer.

Farmer Fred  23:58

Yeah, I guess one way to describe it also would be akin to when you go to the grocery store, you'll see several bins with potatoes. Of course, there's the russet potatoes, the baking potato. It has sort of  a rough, thick skin to it. But if you go over to the refrigerated section in the vegetable department, you'll see new potatoes, and they have a much thinner skin.

Gail Pothour  24:19

Yeah, and the new potatoes are good. They have a real thin skin it will totally slip off if you rub it. The new potatoes are formed when the potato plant is flowering. So that's the point of growth for the plant. The flowers in it triggers it to bulk up the tubers so  the tubers that are underground are starting to bulk up. You could then go in and rob a few new potatoes. They're not going to store because they have this super thin skin. So if any that you would harvest as new potatoes, you'd want to cook them that night.

Farmer Fred  25:00

We should point out too, that when we're talking about curing, it's for the storage of potatoes. Because when you harvest a potato, you can go ahead and eat it that night if you want to.

Gail Pothour  25:09

Oh, right. And if, if in the process of harvesting the potatoes, if you dig them up a little bit, you bruised them, you've gouged them in some way with your spade, when you're getting them out of the ground. Yeah, you would eat those tonight. They're not going to store. And so another reason for the curing is not only to toughen up the skin, but if there's any blemishes that might be on the surface of the potato, those could maybe heal over a little bit, as long as they're not anything too deep. I find that I'll get out there with my my fork, a big spading fork. I think I'm far enough away from the plant and I put it in the soil and pull up the potatoes and I invariably will spear a couple of them. So those you would definitely not want to try to store anything that has a major blemish like that. You'd want to cut it open, clean it out, make sure it's doesn't have dirt and things like that, and eat it right away. If it's too bad, I'd toss it.

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ALL ABOUT POTATOES WITH GAIL, Part 2

Farmer Fred

We got another question in from a listener over on the Facebook page who asked about using organic potatoes for seed as opposed to grocery store potatoes, which have been treated with a sprouting inhibitor. I think we come back to that problem of, it depends what was in your soil.

Gail Pothour  27:55

Well, that's true. We always recommend that if you are going to plant potatoes,you want to buy seed potatoes from a reputable nursery or potato grower catalog, wherever they sell certified disease free seed potatoes. because it's really easy to pass along. symptomless viruses and other diseases that are in the potato that was in the plant, you don't see it in potato. So if you went to the grocery store or farmers market and purchased organically grown potatoes, that means they were just grown using organically acceptable pesticides. you still have some pesticides, they're used, but they're organically acceptable. It doesn't mean that they are disease free. And I can give you an example of this. This is the kind of “do as I say, not as I do”. we always get certified disease free seed potatoes that you've get from a reputable grower. Well, I was at a farmers market one year and bought some potatoes that were grown organically. And I had some leftover and decided well what the heck, I'm going to just try growing these potatoes, I’ll put them in one of my raised beds. And the potatoes grew and the plants did great and I harvested potatoes. But they all had scab. Common scab is a bacterial disease. It's pretty common in potatoes. Well, I have it in all the potatoes that are harvested. So I now have scab in that raised bed. Now whether or not it came from the potatoes that I planted or some other source, it was a good lesson. I don't do that anymore. And if I am going to grow any potatoes in that bed, which I would not do two years in a row, I always get scab resistant varieties now that I buy, because I perpetuated scab, so it could be something You do at your own risk. We always recommend getting disease free, certified seed potatoes.

Farmer Fred  30:07

I was amazed to learn just how little seed potato you need to really have a bountiful production, I think the figure was somewhere along the lines of two pounds of seed potatoes will produce something like 50 pounds of potatoes.

Gail Pothour  30:24

probably depends on the variety. the more likely it's going to be for every pound of  potato that you have, you're going to get anywhere from four to eight pounds, so maybe even 10 pounds, depends on the variety depends on the growing conditions. You know, if it's too hot, that kind of suppresses tuber enlargement, things like that. So it could be a number of factors. But variety