G'day Everyone, yeah I know, two potato videos in a row... My brain's going to mash! Anyway, unrelated - if you are hard up thinking what to get someone this Xmas there's nothing better for the receiver or giver than something you made yourself. A jar of preserve such as jam/jelly, pickles, or some homemade jerky, or even dried fruits, herbs, or spices from your garden is not only cost-effective but also a conversation piece and extra special because it took time and care to make it. Thanks for your support! Cheers :)
⬅️ thinks we need a big update on the whole farm + poultry 👍👍👍👍👍 Just pulled 2 potato plants today and got around 20 beautiful buttery’s then HG Spinach , oregano , HM Garlic Butter Mashed. You can’t go wrong 👍 Crazy Collectables
We are heading into winter here in the states and I'm contemplating planting potatoes and carrots in buckets indoors under grow lights. My basement says around 60 degrees in winter.
Potatoes were the first plant I ever grew on my own. My grandmother and grandfather lived in Maine, USA, so they had to grow all their foods. Potatoes was an absolute staple. So after I grew them (in low light area), I got a decent yield, but not bad considering the potatoes were just eye chunks cut off of store potatoes. But my grandmother treated them like they were the best potatoes ever. She was so damn proud digging them up, cleaning and pealing them. We boiled some potatoes, and baked others, and she said "These are the best potatoes I ever had." True or not, I LOVE that memory, and you helped me remember it with this. Bless you, and rest in peace grandma. Love ya.
When my brother was around 5, my mother got him growing string beans because she heard that kids would eat vegetables if they grew them. He was out checking several times a day to see if they sprouted, wanted to over water them, was ecstatic when the finally made beans, helped my mother cook them. When she went to put some on his plate, he looked at her and said, "Mamma, you know I don't like string beans!"
Hi, i'm an italian professional farmer, and when we plant potatoes we buy seeds indeed, but before planting them we let them sprout a little. Then we cut the potatoes according to the sprouts and THEN we plant them. By doing so each poatoe can make up to four/five sprouts and each sprout is one plant.
i just figured that out after pucking some if mine a bit early, you get 5 or 6 plants on 1 whole potato lots of foliage but not more potato, what i picked was good tho. i used seed potatoes that i set out for several weeks first before planting. next season i will cut the potatoes!
That's what I do (not professionally) with regular store bought potatoes, and I've always had numbers very comparable to nursery seed. One elderly lady asked me to do her garden one year so I did the potatoes how I always do (bag of potatoes in a dark area for a while til the eyes start, cut em up one eye per piece of potato, dig trenches, and then mound up as well at 6" or so leaving a couple sets of leaves out of the dirt, then let them go.) when the lady harvested she said she had never seen so many out of that very garden.. not saying store bought is better, but, I've never been convinced it's worth spending more on common varieties. I'm sure big farms have contracts because of patented genetics, but for the home gardener does it really make a difference?
I say the exact same thing that digging potatoes is like Christmas! I dug mine up just a few days ago. There were some that got frozen from several frosts, so I threw them in the compost pile, but the majority were great. I made some french fries today and they were so sweet.
Every Spring, I find potatoes that I missed digging up in the fall..they are still edible! I do not eat them, though, I use them as seed potatoes; especially, since they were "Pontiac Red" potatoes and I could not find any seed potato packages of them at the store. I have had "Reds" for the past three years that way.
I agree! I have a large raised garden bed with soil I've made from compost & other stuff I've added & it's so great for digging, that the most efficient way is to wait till recent rain has it at the right moisture level & then dig by hand. I put on a pair of washing up gloves so I don't get dirt under my nails & just go to town, digging the whole thing to nearly half a metre down, finding potato after potato. I do sweet potatoes, so I love the way they join to each other & trying to dislodge without snapping them & being able to follow the thin bits that join them as I go deeper & deeper, still finding more potatoes. Nothing better :) (well ok, maybe slightly better is what I have right now & will for the next few months, where there's so much variety & it's so thick that I have to "dig" through the folliage to find goodies like beans, cucumbers etc etc, that's pretty awesome too :)
I think something fascinating about the yield from the grocery store potatoes, is that they were bound for compost or the rubbish once they went bad, so the fact that what was otherwise rubbish at the time produced edible potatoes is so fascinating to me! I’ll have to try this for the forgotten potatoes at the bottom of my cupboard! Theres always a handful that end up at the bottom of the bin and don’t get discovered until too late! 😅
Don’t forget that the potatoes ae usually treated with groth inhibitors when bought in the U SA. and any produce that comes into the USA. Is radiated. Best if you can find Organic heirloom seeds or starts or potatoes. That way if you let a few plants go to seed you can save the seed to plant the following year. Remember God gave us everything we would ever need. Every living thing grows dies but reproduces naturally.👍🙏🏽🇺🇸✌🏻😎
The 1st year I grew potatoes, I just bought reds and yellows from the "whole foods" store and planted wrist deep with mulch. 6-8 lbs turned into 35-40 lbs. The next year, bought potatoes from the regular grocery store and I doubled the amount planted and got similar yields. The next year I did the same thing and, also, planted a package of seed potatoes. The store bought outshined the seed variety by two-fold.
You could try: a) on good soil¹ b) cut up potatoes leaving one eye in each 'seed' c) lay them on the surface d) cover with a few inches of straw e) cover straw with mesh so straw doesn't blow away and provide first drink f) remove mesh when a healthy set of leaves strikes (some people leave it as they have sufficient holes in the mesh) g) harvest crop after leaves wilt which should be just under the straw residue. There may be some necessity to cover any exposed spuds during growing (with another few inches of straw). Watering as required. Simple process, clean spuds, no ground pressure, no villainous prongs, roots stay in the ground doing good work for the next use of that soil. ¹ Not dug up, full of worms, bacteria, fungi and arthropods (soil life) as Regenerative Agriculture recommends.
@@francesmcstay Potatoes are almost foolproof. Give 'em a try. Cut your potatoes into chunks with a couple of eyes each and plant those chunks with the eyes facing up some 6+ inches deep and then just make sure they get watered every few days if it doesnt rain. Done. There are things that require more work, especially layering them, that will increase the yield, but just the basics will get you a decent crop. Just keep a gentle eye on them and if you see any potatoes exposed on the surface just cover them with a few inches of dirt.
Just shows, if you got potatoes that you can’t eat, just plant them! Free food and no waste. I’ve purchased seed potatoes and love that you can grow potatoes you just can get in the store. 💕
Many store bought potatoes have been sprayed with a chemical known as chlorpropham to prevent sprouting. If you want to grow store potatoes you should look for Organic.
@Lory smith Hi Lory 👋 I hope my comment didn't sound as a form of privacy invasion your comment tells of a wonderful woman with a beautiful heart which led me to comment I don't normally write in the comment section but I think you deserve this complement. If you don’t mind can we be friends? Thanks God bless you….
In the American west in the 1870s, an army wife wrote about her meeting with a wise, well liked Indian chief named Spotted Tail. He was chief of a band of Northern Cheyenne, and had his tribe settle down and work the land. One day she was hoeing out stones from her garden when Spotted Tail came to say hello. When he found out what she was doing, he told her not to hoe out the stones. He explained: "Sun heats stones, stones heat ground, ground heats potatoes and ready earlier." She wrote that the reason he was at the fort was to sell his early by 3 weeks harvest of potatoes to the army. She also wrote the next year she tried his method and harvested before anyone else.
You’re doing a great thing by making these videos and teaching gardening for self sufficiency. God forbid if a famine happened , a lot of us would be clueless.
I love the comparison, but I also have found that old store bought potatoes do just as well as the expensive sprout potatoes. I got a pretty good harvest with them this fall. I never spend additional money, if I can use store bought items. I just love your garden and your outgoing personality. I am a big admirer of your videos.
That's it hey, I just use a few varieties from the shops. And then keep some of the harvest for seed. Always picking the best ones for growing. Dutch cremes go the best where I live it seems.
both sprout and store bought you can just put some of the harvested aside to replant for more yes? so really you only need to buy the sprout potatoes once correct? if so one would have a better quality as in the video the sprout potatoes did overall look better
I do the same, and get loads of potatoes from just a few cut up store taters that started sprouting. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I never find them all and have potatoes every year even if I didn't plant any that year. oops.
@HLTRON it always depends on the garden center u buy your seeds from and also on the soil u use/have. Where I come from the seeds in the garden centers seeds are a waste of money and time, using grocery store brought items always worked better and also the planting seeds that one gained in the previous year also worked always well. It is possible that your garden center might have good seeds, but that’s something that u need to figure out for your crops yourself. If you want to compare the options, do it. Use each in equal amount when seeding, check the yield at the end and see which worked best for you. There is no perfect result without trials and errors. But that’s exactly what makes gardening fun😉 oh btw if you live in a region with cold winters, like freezing winter, then only plant potatoes in the same crops every 4years to prevent the potatoes getting sick from bacteria and mold.
One small thing, in our store here they sell regular potatoes and "organic". They spray the regulars with some kind of soap or something so they do not sprout, so they have less store loss. The organics sprout and grow nicely. I had about 5X yield even with the rabbits eating the greens.
I grow my spuds in pots. I used to grow them in raised beds, but you always seem to leave a few (or many) behind. In pots, I upend the pots on a tarp when it’s harvest time and can gather my spuds easily. I grow a mix of seed and store potatoes this way and usually get plenty. I can also grow spuds in pots all year round - temperate zone.
Gail, how large/deep are your pots and how many potatoes do you plant per pot? Tipping out on a tarp seems like the best way to find them all and without the risk of spearing them.
@@wyominghome4857 Most of my pots are elbow to finger tip wide and about the same deep (the big black ones), but not all of them. I use whatever is available. In the big pots I plant 3 or 4 potatoes, yielding up to 30-40 at harvest. The smaller the pot, the less I sow. I make my own growing medium of about 1/3 coconut coir, 1/3 perlite or vermiculite and 1/3 compost and a few worms from the worm farm. After harvest, I never use the mix for potatoes again, but recycle it to my raised beds. That way, I don’t get potato diseases. Hope this helps.
@@michelifig6356 there is a UA-cam channel for the battleship New Jersey, where the curator uses proportions of himself to describe measurements “this is about 1/2 a curator long”for example.
I loved your video telling us to save green potatoes for planting. We had an epic harvest this year because I had enough to plant without buying any from the nursery. Thanks for all of your good information!
I never knew people buy seed potatoes 🥔 lol I've always planted them by buying the kind at the store I wanted, then letting them sit under a cupboard and eye out. Then I quarter them wherever there's a sprout or cut chunks so there's a sprout every chunk and plant in raised hills
I think the wrist seed potatoes had the most baking potatoes because the size was generally larger potatoes. The middle would be good for cut mixed veggies baked with olive oil and garlic (great for small potatoes) and I agree with the last comment that using the old potatoes means everyone can grow a good pile of potatoes even without a lot of money. Thanks, Mark! I have a big pot that I'm going to put a few potatoes in.👍
The row/drill method seed potatoes do look like it is higher yield, but the seed potatoes you planted wrist deep look like they grew a larger potato. I think those were the most successful. If I had to do it again, I'd grow them that way but earlier in the season.
He said it was "late in his season" which I assume this video is recent so it's summer there, which (even his winters) is too hot to really produce well. (one of the major keys for mass production) when potatoes are growing lots of greens it's a lot of energy is going into that, you can see the market ones put majority of their energy into the potatoes. You can grow big plants and focus on their veg cycle (you can do this by lower light per day, more soil moisture, cooler temperatures, and most importantly more potassium nutrient input than nitrogen) because mark's gardens are always very nitrogen rich, most plants that are healthy will be focused on vegetation growth (best for any plants you directly eat leafs etc of) and in his potatoes case he was interested in the fruit growth.
I don't think so. All things being equal, if the same number of seeds were planted, the middle pile of seed potatoes produced many more potatoes! even though they weren't as large. It could be that in pile one fewer potatoes were planted and the ones planted had more space between them which allowed them to grow bigger. Therefore, since the row method produced more, I would use THAT method but space the "seed" potatoes farther apart so like they were in pile #1.
@@emilybh6255 in the second one he planted way many more potatoes than on the third or first raise bed. Taking that into account, the third bed did the best. Watch the video again. The middle raise bed he left no separation between potatoes in the row. The "fist deep" raised beds were about a foot apart.
@@PRDreams Read the second part of my comment again. I agree the first method grew the biggest potatoes but the fact remains the row /trench method produced a greater number of potatoes. If you think about WHY the first method grew the biggest ones, the obvious answer has to be spacing. Therefore, to increase the harvest, use the method that produced the largest number BUT MODIFY IT to increase the space between each seed. That way you should be able to get the best of both methods. Also, you missed where I said "all things being equal" where I meant, the same number of seeds were planted in each bed.
My fifth grade teacher was a gardener and she had us all grow pole beans in cups. We transferred them to the ground after they were a few inches tall and mine grew really tall. This was in the 60’s and I loved that woman very much. Many years later I saw an article in the news paper about her. She was a master gardener. Her name was Ava Sue. 55 years later I still think of her when I eat pole beans. The small potatoes made me think of eating pole beans and little potatoes cooked together. My only claim to fame growing potatoes was once planting a 50 pound bag of red seed potatoes and harvesting 300 lbs. Only once! I’m getting ready to build my wife some raised beds for salad greens so I find your channel encouraging. I wish I could find the same kind of metal containers you have but I don’t think they exist here in the States. Thank you for sharing and bringing back some memories. Greetings from Alabama, US. Bless you and yours , Robert.
Btw commercially grown potatoes are sprayed w pesticides a lot! Before planting the ground is sprayed with it, then as they grow, the plants are sprayed, then sprayed and irradiated again after harvesting to prevent sprouting- best to grow your own organically 😊
I've even been comparing different (old, starting to decay/root) potatoes from different supermarket sources. I've kept some of the best ones for seconds, and we now use these every year, it's like its DNA is so strong, it just will not fail over here in The NL (Europe). We're at the 3rd generation of once too old to eat organic potatoes from one of the largest supermarket chains (Ahold/AH), and they still deliver by far the best yields and best tasting ones too. We get about 20 of them out of 1 semi-rotten old one. The most important trick I use is I let the old ones sprout half under water in our freshwater (indoor) aquarium. As soon as the green leaves start to show I plant them in the soil. They then already have lots of roots in the aquarium water. I've heard that by doing this you give them such a well-fed start, lots of potassium, kali and nitrates from the fish, that this is why they deliver such high yields. 1 -> 20 is pretty damn efficient!
Never heard of this method, and we just happen to have a goldfish tank! So you just stick them half in the tank water? How do you keep them in place? Do they effect the water parameters much? I've only just saved my fish from a nitrite spike (one passed from poisoning though) so I guess I'm a bit overcautious now. Thanks if you can get back!
@@kittenonacloud1012 I would imagine spear the potato on a stick that crosses the aquarium. Theoretically the potatoes should consume excess nitrates in the water and help prevent algae overbloom so long as your filtration system is adequately converting ammonia to nitrites and then to nitrates, although I've never tried it myself.
That's a really interesting idea. I have a large aquarium so I might give that a try. Do they just float in the tank or do you have to do something to keep them half submerged.
I am glad you did this. I always plant from store bought now, have for over a decade. I can get 50 pounds of potatoes from the store for anywhere between $7.99- 14.99 depending on time of year and variety. Seed potatoes here average $3-5 a pound. The old store bought seem to always give me a better harvest also.
Try this, it will cost less, let the potato sprout spuds, then shave those spuds off with just a little meat making it a flat surface on the bottom, you let the potatoes sit under a cabinet or in a dark closet with no water for a few days or so to allow them to do this. Then after you cut them off you do this again for a few more days to let them get ready to plant. Then you plant them with the flat side down 4 to 6 inches down 18 inches apart. You get more plants from less potatoes! :)
I have planted potatoes from my kitchen that had sprouted and shrivelled. I was always thrilled with the results. I just dug a hole and stuck them in my garden, and got enough to make few decent meals from each potato. It’s better than throwing them away.
I am from the USA, the Pacific Northwest region. The method of choice for sowing potatoes is to always plant them 4 inches deep in very rich soil. No mulch. We wait until the plants are well established before adding mulch. Then we always wait until the green tops of the plants are good and dead, no green at all, before harvesting.
PNW here too, precisely how I was taught. Bin or bag growing simply adds space to my garden and easier on me physically for doing harvest, but I still do the same basics.
@@LORIJUDD2151 Oh Hi! I’m new to gardening, I will appreciate your suggestion on this . Should I plant in containers, raised garden beds or in the ground?
I live in California and my local Costco store has had organic baby potatoes in the food section. It is a mix of a small yellow potato and a small red new potato. They chit very readily and I use them as 'seed potatoes'. They were only about $9 for a bag and because they are small, I don't have to cut them up or do any prep work before planting. Just let the bag sit around for a bit and then plant them out when I'm ready. The first year I planted about half and the other half became all wrinkly before I planted them out. They still grew good potatoes. I have noticed that actual 'seed potatoes' can be expensive so I thought this was a great alternative. Thanks for your video, Mark!
@@marydaleo3701 That depends on the size of the bag. Seed potatoes can be $9 or more for a single kilo, so the baby potatoes probably work out much cheaper.
I grabbed a bag for about $5 recently, put them in the grow bags, mulched and set them against the south side of my shed. Can't wait to see how they did!
Thank you for sharing this information! I'm using old grocery potatoes that chitted in my cupboard and I cut them up to quarters, dried them off for a week, I'll be planting tomorrow! Guess I'll try setting them in wrist deep & mulching! I appreciate your experience! ❤️
I bought organic potatoes from Whole Foods and seed potatoes Lowes. I planted them both in 5 separate 10 gallon fabric pots. I added more soil as the leaves grew. I didn't know if they were determinate or indeterminate, so I just grew them all the same. I gave them plenty of water, fertilized every 10 to 14 days with inorganic fertilizer, over 8 hours of sunlight daily. I harvested them when most of the greenery died back. My results were not a much as I would've liked. Most were very small. Next year I'll be using 20 gallon fabric pots and more organic fertilizers:)
We like the little potatoes for roasting - drizzled with olive oil, and adding a little, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Thanks for doing the 3-part comparison. Even though planting was done late in the season, you still got a decent haul! Best wishes from Kate in Olympia, WA - 12/5/2021.
We use big ones for roasting, cuz of the Peeling part that’s needed before cooking..the small ones we cook with the peel and after cooking one can pull of the skin alone, without wasting any of the potato flesh..is nice as side dish to fish
I love all your experiments. I guess it shows me that it is more important to just get out and 👍🏻 do it as to worry about how you are doing it ( as the perfect gardener). Big 👍🏻 to you and thanks. 👍🏻
Last year I threw potato peels in compost pile and they sprouted like crazy so I dug up and put in container. Got a handful 0f small potatoes in a couple months. This year going to plant more seriously. I think your 2nd bed of potatoes had the biggest potatoes. Thank you for sharing. Enjoy your gardening and lovely land. Good tips!!
I often plant supermarket potatoes using those that have sprouted eyes and have also found them to be productive - certainly productive enough for me, one old woman gardener, and they don't cost what seed potatoes do. I enjoyed the video - as always. Thank you.
Season 14 of growing potatoes for me this year in the mid-Atlantic eastern US. I tried 10 gallon grow bags this time and results were average, however, the bags kept bugs out of the medium and it was fun & easy to just dump the bags to harvest, no more cutting them with a shovel! I also used a dehydrator to preserve them, which worked out really well.
This year we planted yukon golds from the grocery store with the drill method and have harvested 11 lbs off the first 2/3rds of the crop.. I'm guessing it'll end up being about 17 lbs total. I think using a tall container might get a better yield, using the 'thirds' method; fill the container 1/3rd of the way up for the initial planting, let them grow, add another 1/3rd of the soil, let them grow, then add the final 1/3rd of soil. We did that a couple years ago with great results.
@@J4Julz nah the first time I just used 5 gallon buckets from the hardware store and the 2nd time I used 15 gallon plastic pots I ordered from a garden supply place.. I actually had a better yield from the 5 gallon buckets, but I think that was my fault for not planting them at the best time. Personally I'd be paranoid about using tires because of the material, but it's probably not as dangerous as I imagine. Otherwise not a bad idea.. it would certainly keep the plants in the sunlight instead of down in a container.
Finally! A video about something I can grow here in Iceland :D Thanks for making your content, a lot of quality information accompanied with great humor.
Love the comparison! From what I saw, it matches my experience. Wrist deep method: More space between plants gives larger potatoes Furrow method: More potatoes, but slightly smaller Supermarket potatoes: Not the most productive, but a win no matter how much you get. A good way to limit food waste.
I think the first bed really produced a good amount considering these were potatoes that you usually discard. That harvest will produce several meals for a family, so it was a good effort. Overall, it gives us several options. Thank you.
Hi Darlene 👋 I hope my comment didn't sound as a form of privacy invasion your comment tells of a wonderful woman with a beautiful heart which led me to comment I don't normally write in the comment section but I think you deserve this complement. If you don’t mind can we be friends? Thanks God bless you….
Maybe you did this but to get the best storage out of the potatoes cut the vines like you did and let them sit for about two weeks. From an Idaho potato farmer. Helps set the skins and they'll bulk better.
Well Mark the seed potatoes buried wrist deep in the left most bed gave you the biggest spuds. The middle bed with the seed potatoes grown in drills gave you the greatest number of potatoes but most of those are small. The bed on the right with the dried-up left-over supermarket potatoes planted wrist deep did a splendid job for what you had to start with and a couple of nice sized spuds to boot. I would definitely go with the left bed, which had the nursery seed potatoes buried wrist deep, as the best overall producer of potatoes that I would like to cook with. What a great video with a spudly thumbs up.
We just pulled our first potato harvest up today. We were really happy with what we got and we just did the wrist method (but I didn't mulch due to being sick). Kids had a ball digging the spuds out lol. 1 variety didn't do well, but 2 others did so we are going to replant in a different bed in a week or so. I'd say both the wrist and trench are equally as good.
Started watching SSM then fell in love with gardening and homesteading. Now I’ve found permaculture and syntropic forestry. But all thanks to finding this channel.
I live in Maine (Bath), and Maine is definitely pro potato. Lobsters and blueberries might get most of the attention, but Northern potatoes are wonderful. My gram was a fabulous gardener, and she got our family through some pretty tough times. 💕 😃
I still remember a good 40 yrs ago my father in law had a big garden. I had never eaten a home grown potato. They were far and away the best things I’d ever tasted. Along with his white half runner green beans.
This year will be my first year of gardening. Nobody on UA-cam has the charisma of character you portray in these videos. I'm so excited to use gardening techniques I've learned from you.
Your garden trial matches what I've discovered after doing many years of similar trials: successful home gardening is really simple. Thanks for posting.
Great videi mate. If you use store potatoes that have gone to seed and decide to cut them in half, some people recommend letting the cut face dry for a few days so it hardens and protects itself from rotting or infection. We accidentally grew some in a compost pile, the plants grew tall and gave us a good mixture of sizes. Happy to use anything that's being chucked out 😊
I planted eyes up peels from store bought potatoes that sat on the counter a bit long before use. I ate 90% of the mother potatoes and planted the rest this spring, only because I had the room and wanted to see how they did. I was very happy with my kitchen scraps. I have a whole nother meal now. 👍 Thanks
Interesting experiment! Thanks for taking us through it. I think the lesson here is that it’s better to plant SOMETHING, even funky old store-bought taters, rather than nothing. That’s a pretty good yield from shriveled old spuds most folks would throw out. And the spuds are bigger without the fussing of the traditional method of the middle bed. I go with Bed #3.
Thanks for sharing, great results. I only grown a couple of buckets starting at the bottom and filling as they grow, but it’s good to see the different techniques. Thanks again👍
Given a choice, and how I prepare potatoes, makes a ton of difference. If I wanted large taters to peel- the wrist seed potatoes, hands down, is the way to go, by their size. Not peeling the middle. But, the throw out taters didn't do bad, considereing they were headed to the compost pile or to the chickens. GOOD video! Thanks Mark!
We have a large family and get 10lbs of potatoes at a go. If they start to sprout heading into Spring we generally cut them in half and plant them in pods (circle of 6 about 2 feet in diameter) 8 ish inches apart and get enough potatoes in spring to make it from harvest till late winter.
The difference I see - and its the same result I have experienced - is that the biggest difference is not in the production, but in the amount of green potatoes produced by not "hilling" in the potatoes. You middle bed appeared to have almost no green potatoes - while the others had quite a few. Throw the green ones out and then compare the result and you would have a clear winner. And it's a combination of variety and method that makes this work. Some varieties are more inclined to surface, they need more hilling and more mulch.
@@chrissilliker8633 take soil from between the drills and put it on top of the drill after the potato plant breaks the surface. It keep tubers covered as weather erodes the drill. Therefore less sunburn and more room from tuber growth.
@@leighburville2717 drill is the same as hill, Where i live we use drill but we still call it hilling. Here you get a lot of farmer praise if you have nice straight drills.
The way I grew my (store-bought, eye sprouting) potatoes this last season was to cut most of the potato out and put the sprouting eyes in a thin dish with water for a couple weeks so a root system would begin to grow. Once that happened I planted the starter sprouts in half-gallon milk jugs with holes punched in the bottom for drainage. Got me some REALLY tall plants, with a long root system, and when I transferred them again (cutting up the jug to not traumatize the plant), into a bigger, deeper pot, it got me a really big yield. We buy the smaller red potatoes so the things are going to be smaller in general, but the average size was golf ball to tennis ball size, with a few on either side. This method gives you time to do a second rotation if you want. Note: Keep an eye on the potatoes to see if any surface and immediately cover, because squirrels will nibble the things.
All this transplanting is extra work and unnecessary. I plant the eyes directly in the soil, with some small area exposed. That is after a night of air drying on a paper towel in the kitchen (shade).
I love your videos! I've been veg gardening for about 7 yrs now, and I am still learning new things! I've learned so much about gardening from you! All the way in North Texas, USA! I am getting ready to set up my fourth raised bed that will be for potatoes. I bought seed potatoes from my local nursery. I'm going to try the trench method. Keep up with the awesome videos and gardening!!
I’m glad to see that supermarket potatoes do so well for basically being leftovers. I ordered some indeterminate potato varieties to try this year. We are going to build up the sides of the bed and keep hilling them to see what happens. I love to try new things, too.
You only use trenches for indeterminate potatoes and bury them as they grow because the will produce potatoes all along the buried stem. Those types need a much longer growing season to get a full harvest, 90 to 100 days. Determinate varieties can just be buried when you plant them and will produce potatoes just below the surface at one level, no need for trenching. They also have a shorter growing time. Rule of thumb for potatoes is when they bloom you are likely getting little new potatoes below the soil and when the plants die back it’s time to harvest. You have to know the variety you are planting in order to look up which type they are. Nice experiment, though and you got a lot of potatoes for growing them in the heat. I would store the green ones for seed for next time.
Thank you! Your explanation helps me realize probably why mine were a flop last year. I planted organic potatoes that I bought at the store... they always chit before I can get to them all, so why not plant them. Part of the issue, I believe, was the organic soil I bought had been compromised, because it turned various seedlings yellow, which may have stunted growth. I have no idea if they are determinate or indetermininate, but the potatoes I planted likely needed much more time either way.
Tracy I didn't know that about the determinate and indeterminate. Now I know why, when I dig potatoes, some are deep and some aren't. I will look up the varieties. Thanks heaps 👍
@scout I'm in the Chicago area. The challenge I have is storing potatoes between harvest and the start of the colder weather. Once it gets cold outside, I can store the potatoes in the attached garage which keeps them between 40 and 50 F but right after harvest, I keep them in the basement which is between 60 and 65 F. The basement is a little warm for storing potatoes. A proper root cellar would be nice.
Hey Mark thanks for making these videos. I'm 37 and got into gardening slowly over the last 10 years. It's extremely rewarding and enjoyable to work outside, shape the land, and actually create things. Dad and I just watched this video, as well as a few others. I didn't grow potatoes last year since I tried some other things, but I'm going to give them another go this upcoming 2022 season after watching this. I've been doing well with pretty much whatever I try growing, although there have been some failures. A mistake I often make is I plant certain things too close. It's a lesson I've learned, though. My new concentration is composting natural material off the property and working on the soil quality. I've been doing that for two years now and will continue that into the future every year. We live in the state of Wisconsin - a small town between Lake Michigan and Lake Winnebago.
Love your video's, One request. When you talk about " planting at the end of the season " could you tell us what month you did this and then maybe tell us the perfect time to plant. I know you might do this in other video's but it saves having to "dig" back for info . Cheers.
If he's Australian, he'd be telling you the wrong month to plant in the Northern Hemisphere. Although you could probably extrapolate it out by adding six months.
I grew potatoes for the first time this year from potatoes that I didn't eat fast enough and ended up with an alright amount from what I planted. Left all the green ones in the garden bed and ended up with another handful just recently. Happy with my results considering I was originally going to toss them in the compost. Liked seeing the experiment with the different potatoes and growing methods.
Po-tay-toes! Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew. Lovely big golden chips with a nice piece of fried fish. Great crop mate! Start of summer at mine too in QLD, about to get my harvest, very excited 👏☝️🧑🌾👍
Damn, we should have gone through with your plan, Putin would have been too occupied with his backyard potato farming results to have time to mess with Ukraine
I appreciate all of your experiments. My potatoes were rubbish this year, which was my fault alone. I tried growing them in a small raised bed and there wasn't enough room. I grow german butterball indeterminate and a few Yukon golds. I will go back to the tall trash can method next year. Its cold and winter here in the midwest, USA and I enjoyed seeing you in the warm sunshine! I can't wait for spring!
I had the same issue with the little leftovers of the german small potatoes this year. At first I their was cuz I asked a friend to watch over and water them for me while we were moving and renovating. Ours had a lot of room but it was less then half a hand full of way to small potatoes, can only use them as food for our scampi..turned out the friend forgot about them on his balcony and did not water them during the hottest time of the year, I thought that was the reason, but reading you had the same issue I guess it was cuz of the potatoes themselves..srsly never had such a small harvest........
Hi January's 👋 I hope my comment didn't sound as a form of privacy invasion your comment tells of a wonderful woman with a beautiful heart which led me to comment I don't normally write in the comment section but I think you deserve this complement. If you don’t mind can we be friends? Thanks God bless you….
I have decided to grow some potatoes this year - my first time - and this was the perfect video for me to see. I had been over-complicating things with all sorts of questions in my head. Now I realise I just need to get on with it. Thanks!
Thanks for the video, I think the yield and quality will be much better if you plant the seed 10 centimeters deeper. Then you have a better buffer with moisture, and less green and more tubers. And what I'm missing are the red Desiree potatoes you planted.
Good morning Mark, we have had our second harvest since we started our garden last April and we have used the canvass buckets and the standard birdies beds. We are going to give the bags a miss next year and stick to the standard beds. Our best results have been with certified seed potatoes. And we are near Toowoomba where its a lot cooler
Thank you for this video, I really like asking questions and setting up experiments to find answers. I thought the store bought seed potato beds would at least double the grocery potatoes and I was happy to see the grocery potato's did as well as they did. Thanks again.
I am going to try to grow some potatoes this year. I plan to plant them a little later than normal because the cold here seems to last longer. I'm going to plant them in cardboard boxes and we will see how much I get. It's just an experiment. I live in a mobile home park, so, space is limited.
Something is always better than nothing! Great job Mark, I'll continue to plant all my rogue chitters, plus my designated seed spuds. Much love from Western Australia x
Thanks for making Australian Gardening videos :) I would love to see someone make a series of "what to plant in the month of x". I always feel like planting something when I watch your videos but I'm not sure what is the best crop for this time of year here
Unfortunately there's not much in the way of hard and fast rules with gardening like that. Most of it depends on where your located, someone in Michigan or Scotland will have very different planting schedules than someone in Australia or Texas, the number of days in your "growing season" average temperatures, soil composition and a bunch of other factors all play a part in when and how to plant things.
Starting the day with a SSM video is a great way to do so! Cheers from the west indies Mark! Lots of things in common with you here, including the love for rosella...
Just discovered this channel for me. You are like a seasoned dad who teaches us kids how things work and I love it! I also never knew that Potatoes can vary so much in colour? Does it do anything with the taste or firmness? Good to know that even the oldest store potatoes can be of use - I think rom all three methods I would prefer the 2nd method the most (the one on the left); those seem to grow fewer but larger tubers!
I like the left hand side myself because although the seed potatoes were the same as the middle it’s less labor than doing drills and it looks like there’s a lot of bigger spuds. Having a big haul of smaller potatoes is a pain to clean for months on end in my experience so I prefer a mix of smaller and bigger depending on the recipe.
Another potato idea: potato tower. Cut barrel or something similar into 20 cm tall rings. Fill the first one with soil and plant a potato there. When it will sprout then add another ring and fill it with soil, but don't burry all the leaves. Repeat. Buried stem will produce potatoes. Some say it can increase yield up to 3 times. Good idea for confined spaces, yet needs more water. Another variant are hessian bags. Fill the bag to the half with soil, roll down the edges and plant a potato. After sprouting cover the stem with soil and roll up bag's edges a little bit ect. Harvesting is much easier: just flip the bag.
No it's just don't work. Potato tower is a nonsense that everybody repeat but nobody tried. You can find on internet why it's not true. Don't worry I also believed in this.
@@krzysztofrudnicki5841 It's not about magically grow tons of potatoes. It surely is hard to believe in 3x more potatoes. If it was the case then farmers would plant using only this method. It is more like making possible to grow potatoes in confined spaces, i.e. balcony or small garden. Nevertheless thanks for pointing it out, I'll try this method next season and share the results.
I love this! I have grown potatoes with some hit and miss. We grew up just cutting potatoes that had sprouted eyes and cut them into quarters. My grandpa used to stack old tires and fill with soil and layering the cuttings then soil then cuttings. When it was time to harvest, we would tip over the tire stacks and pick out the potatoes. That worked very well without having to use a pitchfork so we didn't damage any I like your drill method and am going to try that. Thank you! Great video.
It was interesting results. Based on these results, if you're handicapped as I am the difference between the seed potatoe results I would do the bury them and leave them as it would require less output from me.
SO listening to your advise about where to plant potatoes. I was attempting to save some from dying of dehydration so I could plant them in something. I was looking for a container in other words. Days go by without finding a container... just kept adding water to try to keep them alive. Apon watering them the third day. None of them are wrinkled anymore, and all of them are going nuts in the clear container with only water in them. NOW TO KEEP MY STINKING CAT FROM PULLING THEM OUT OF THE CONTAINER BECAUSE SHE THINKS THEIR TOYS FOR HER... I found one in my living room one morning. They are in the kitchen window, in the small container, to catch the morning sun.
It depends on whether you were growing indeterminate or determinate varieties as they grow differently. Determinate will only give you a set number of spuds in one layer on each plant and don't need hilling, while indeterminates grow in several layers and will produce a lot more and do need hilling. at least some of the supermarket ones were probably indeterminates as they were pushing out of the soil trying to grow in layers. It's hard to say without knowing whether you're growing determinates or indeterminates or a mix of both. To see what you'd really get, you probably need to grow all determinates or all indeterminates (or the same number of plants of each) to make a proper comparison. still a nice haul altogether for future dinners!
Thanks for mentioning that because I didn't know they come in determinate or indeterminate. Now I will have to check to see when I plant next spring as that will determine whether to hill or not.
@@anneciamartin9514 yes, it's good to know whether you're growing determinates or indeterminate as using the right method will give you better results. It can be hard to find out which are which with some varieties though which is frustrating bUt there are lists available if you do a bit of research
And what they call produce in the supermarket is not necessarily the same thing as what it's called in the seed catalog or garden center. I like the Red Bliss potatoes in the supermarket because they can be used so many ways but what are they called at the garden center or in the seed catalog. I think Yukon Gold is the same thing which is another nice multi-use potato.
interesting info, thanks for sharing, I didn't know about in/determinate potatoes until reading another comment & had no idea what it was on about until you just explained it perfectly, so thank you :)
I've always just popped them into the ground and covered them. Ruth Stout used to just drop them on the ground and throw straw over them. Ive used shop-bought potatoes almost exclusively, because I couldnt rationalize the cost of "seed" potatoes over the shop-bought. I reckon most people just put too much energy into growing potatoes - they are one of the easiest, self-managing food plants you can grow.
I planted store potatoes too last year (from the skin not whole potatoes) We just finished using them ( they were like 3 kilos) I dug the garden under the grass next to the fence (renting and not allowed to plant 😜) My daughter loved exploring the plants and seeing how they grew They weren't much nor big But will keep doing this for now
@@lilaclizard4504there is a dry spot in the grass i planted a small basil and some herbs , and last year i planted some potatoes under the lawn grass (it wasn't that successful but we loved it) We don't plan to stay this way forever
@@zk.13 that's just so sad though that a landlord could have the power to tell you you can't have a garden :'( Can you do anything with pots? Or are there limits on them too, cause they'd cill the grass they were sitting on? Have a look at kratky hydroponics, you might be able to do that, especially for stuff like herbs. It's basically putting some holes in the top of a milk bottle to let air in to the top of the roots, while filling below with hydroponic nutrients & the plants grow in that. I use it quite a bit cause it's really space efficient & my garden space is small, but could be good in your setting too & the milkbottles are really easy to move around as needed. Make sure you use proper hydroponic nutrients if you do it, a lot of people don't, but in my experience there's a HUGE difference in growth with & without that All the best in moving though, would be so much better to have control over your garden wouldn't it!
@@lilaclizard4504 i appreciate the tips and reply :) i do plan on putting pots in the driveway if we're staying at this property Our landlord is the worst, but the house is spacious and the kids like the yard to play Thank you
@@zk.13 large house & yard are good :) Just sad you can't grow stuff :( I'll bet you have to mow the grass too do you? yard responsibilities, but no control over what's in it :'( Try the kratky :) should work well in the settings you have :) Only for above ground veggies & herbs, potatoes etc don't work in it, beans are a really good starter one I found, huge yield from a tiny footprint. I put each of the bean plants into a 1 litre milk bottle, with plants like chillies in 2 litre instead
We usually put the potatoes about 8 inches deep and at least 10-12 inches apart. We had dirt to the rows twice during the year so the plant has lots of space to grow under. In my opinion, probably less crop due to the spacing. Only so much space for the plants to grow 6 inches deep and maybe 8 inches apart. Lastly, I would also add the supermarket patch also had red potatoes that only grow to small sizes usually half of the more common potato. We called those red ones in my parts of Canada we called garden potatoes that we use as a side with butter and salt or in salads.
You said, "sometimes you just gotta have a go." That's exactly how I approach gardening. What's it gonna hurt anyhow, plus the knowledge you gain from just trying something is invaluable.
I live in Alberta, Canada and one year, the snow came fairly early in the fall and it ended up staying for the winter. There were at least 80 hills of potatoes in my garden that never got harvested that fall. Of course over the winter, everything was frozen solid (we get -40 here) and in the spring, all of the potatoes turned into mush which I roto-tilled into the soil. The garden production over the next three years where the frozen potatoes were mixed in with the soil was absolutely incredible. All of the potatoe hills were producing over 20 decent potatoes per hill and some were more than 30! That got me thinking about using a cover crop of potatoes to organically fertilize a field for barley the following year. Even considering losing a year on the field, I think that it would still be cheaper than buying fertilizer and you end up with a premium organic product that would definitely be in demand, especially if it was good enough for malt barley.
@@falsnamae3511 oh! !!! I guess that’s why Elliott didn’t specify lollll. Oops! I never bothered to learn F and didn’t know that. Learn something new everyday :) I was thinking it’d be about -25F :) ty for that!… I also didn’t know until a couple of years ago that New England isn’t a state! That news was a shocker lol. The USA is full of surprises :)
@@farstrider79 i was just going to say this. The farmers around here have been planting diakon "tiller" radishes to help break up deadpan from so many years of plowing in older fields. Plus the composting radishes really seem to boost soil health. Plus. They are pretty tasty. My freind farmer Dave called his buddy and got permission for me to dig a few to eat cuz they are $2 a lb in the store. They were so good. Plus the darn things were as big as my leg! Lol. I even pickled some Japanese style with soy and miso. Took to the farmer and let him taste it. He was shocked. He figured they would taste bad. We harvested right after first frost but before it started freezing. They are really good cubed and roasted too. Like turnips.
I grow spuds in southern Germany in recycled store-bought compost bags, punctured and put on slatted wooden stands to aid drainage. It has worked very well for years, giving much bigger yields in proportion to soil than any plantings in the ground or raised bed. And dead easy to harvest . You just tip the bags out onto a potting table, and then recycle the soil with a bit of added blood and bone, lime and manure for great results with peas, pumpkins, tomatoes, melons, peppers, chili plants next year. Spuds do grand things to soil. Results were good for years until last year. This year we had a never ending northern hemisphere winter freeze, giving us frosts into early June. Not experienced within living memory. And then a cool wet summer, and early autumn rainy chill. So yields from plantings in the brief March thaw, were much lower than usual. Plants need warmth, sun, and CO2, a vital nutrient. Potatoes, like strawberries (disaster crop here this cold, cloudy, wet season) don't need much soil. But they they do need loose slightly acidic soil (do not add lime!). They are happy if they have about 8 inches of good compost soil mix under them, and 8 inches over them. I have found that banking up around the surface greenery doesn't make any difference. It's just unnecessary work. I have heard and read on mainstream media here that this summer, 2021, has been the "warmest on record" in the northern hemisphere. Not on my records. And I have been here, in England and Germany, for nearly 70 years. Trust your own senses, your own experiences. Only you know reality. Thanks Mark. Sorry to have gone on a bit. You are clearly, what we in northern England, call "a good un". And you know your stuff. Thanks for the great videos. Cheers, mate.
I agree, at the end of august the weather was freezing like 20years ago(back then autumn started at the end of august, I know it cuz a friends birthday is at the beginning of august and she was happy that it was still warm around her birthday to have a party in the garden while it’s already became to cold for that at the end of the month) I actually checked the weatherstations close by and it was freezing on my balcony but the weatherstation was telling it would be 18•C but it was below 5•C according to the thermometer I have...maybe it’s cuz I live quite low and most weatherstations are quite far up? In Russia/Siberia pipes are adjusted 2m above the ground, the reason : if they bury the waterpipes in the ground like Germany does the water in them would freeze, but by having them above the ground the cold stays on the ground and the pipes don’t freze...maybe that’s why we have misinformation on temperatures...
I do trust my own senses, instincts, and my own reality. Hope things are going ok for you in Southern Germany. Reminiscent of the early 30's in Germany here, where I live. "Mass psychosis" prevails. I made the decision not to escape, prior to being prevented from doing so, by discriminatory "government health mandates". Am riding it out. On the land. Cheers and Merry Christmas from the "true north" but it's no longer strong, and no longer "free".
One thing people can also try is I've noticed potatoes growing from the peels i've discarded in the compost pile. So you don't even necessarily need to plant whole potatoes, if you've got some scrap peels try putting them in soil with some compost and they might sprout.
That was a good test. It's best to know if your potato variety is determinate or indeterminate. Determinate or early varieties normally set the tubers at one elevation and do not benefit much from hilling. Indeterminate will continue to grow and will benefit from hilling and normally, in my experience, make more taters.
Good morning, good to see your work in the video. Would you consider removing half of your soil in your potato containers, shifting the remaining soil to one side, adding leaves and brown matter to compost and layering it with soil up to 2/3 of the bed during your period of bed rotation and rejuvenation? Since potatoes seem to grow on the top of your beds perhaps you can reduce the height of your beds and start lower in the beds and add the rejuvenated soil as the potatoes grow? The method of adding the nutritious soil to the potatoes is referred to a hilling it. you can mulch as you go along for water retention, however you would need to use your soil as you need it.
You could probably just water with fortified compost tea and achieve the same thing - or better if you fortify the tea with sea veggies and certain herbs like Comfrey and Nettles.
Mark has said in previous videos that he uses the height of his beds to help out his back, so I would guess reducing the height of his beds would not be an option. Also he uses hügelkultur methods in his beds. The "Ruth Stout" or "no dig" method uses straw as the compost above her potatoes, there's an old video on UA-cam that shows her planting and harvesting. ua-cam.com/video/GNU8IJzRHZk/v-deo.html
@@A_nony_mous Additionally I think he had them growing/starting out in winter didn't' he? So with the angle of the sun, half way down the bed would potentially not even give any direct sun for the first month or 2 of growing, which presumably wouldn't be good for them
Howdyyawl from the land down under. Potatos, yum. Doesn't matter how many that are harvested. They'll all taste good. Saves buying them. Gettig back to a earlier video that you showed tje bread you made. Looked very nice by the way. I've got 2 ploughnan loaves in the oven now. My own recipe. About to come out of oven. It's all good fun. Keeping it real 😊
Would be interested in a taste comparison! Even though the drill method produced the most, the seed/wrist crop had a larger average size so was probably the best! great job, keep it up
G'day Everyone, yeah I know, two potato videos in a row... My brain's going to mash! Anyway, unrelated - if you are hard up thinking what to get someone this Xmas there's nothing better for the receiver or giver than something you made yourself. A jar of preserve such as jam/jelly, pickles, or some homemade jerky, or even dried fruits, herbs, or spices from your garden is not only cost-effective but also a conversation piece and extra special because it took time and care to make it. Thanks for your support! Cheers :)
⬅️ thinks we need a big update on the whole farm + poultry 👍👍👍👍👍
Just pulled 2 potato plants today and got around 20 beautiful buttery’s then HG
Spinach , oregano , HM Garlic Butter
Mashed. You can’t go wrong 👍
Crazy Collectables
I did like three in a row back in the spring! Sometimes you just get potatoes on the brain!
Small ones are great for roasties!
Keep them coming! We are getting ready to plant, and by cracky- you just showed me which one I will be using! Whoo-hoo thanks, Mark!
We are heading into winter here in the states and I'm contemplating planting potatoes and carrots in buckets indoors under grow lights. My basement says around 60 degrees in winter.
the big question is, "what ones tasted better?"
Potatoes were the first plant I ever grew on my own. My grandmother and grandfather lived in Maine, USA, so they had to grow all their foods. Potatoes was an absolute staple. So after I grew them (in low light area), I got a decent yield, but not bad considering the potatoes were just eye chunks cut off of store potatoes.
But my grandmother treated them like they were the best potatoes ever. She was so damn proud digging them up, cleaning and pealing them. We boiled some potatoes, and baked others, and she said "These are the best potatoes I ever had."
True or not, I LOVE that memory, and you helped me remember it with this. Bless you, and rest in peace grandma. Love ya.
They were the best potatoes ever because you grew them ❤
This is soo sweet awwww
When my brother was around 5, my mother got him growing string beans because she heard that kids would eat vegetables if they grew them. He was out checking several times a day to see if they sprouted, wanted to over water them, was ecstatic when the finally made beans, helped my mother cook them. When she went to put some on his plate, he looked at her and said, "Mamma, you know I don't like string beans!"
@@brucetidwell7715 Ain‘t that the truth… T.T
Well, if the best granny said so then I have no reason to disbelieve her. RIP.
Hi, i'm an italian professional farmer, and when we plant potatoes we buy seeds indeed, but before planting them we let them sprout a little. Then we cut the potatoes according to the sprouts and THEN we plant them. By doing so each poatoe can make up to four/five sprouts and each sprout is one plant.
i just figured that out after pucking some if mine a bit early, you get 5 or 6 plants on 1 whole potato lots of foliage but not more potato, what i picked was good tho. i used seed potatoes that i set out for several weeks first before planting. next season i will cut the potatoes!
That's what I do (not professionally) with regular store bought potatoes, and I've always had numbers very comparable to nursery seed. One elderly lady asked me to do her garden one year so I did the potatoes how I always do (bag of potatoes in a dark area for a while til the eyes start, cut em up one eye per piece of potato, dig trenches, and then mound up as well at 6" or so leaving a couple sets of leaves out of the dirt, then let them go.) when the lady harvested she said she had never seen so many out of that very garden.. not saying store bought is better, but, I've never been convinced it's worth spending more on common varieties. I'm sure big farms have contracts because of patented genetics, but for the home gardener does it really make a difference?
I always loved digging potatoes, it's a bit like Christmas, like unwrapping each gift, big or small is magical and amazing.
I say the exact same thing that digging potatoes is like Christmas! I dug mine up just a few days ago. There were some that got frozen from several frosts, so I threw them in the compost pile, but the majority were great. I made some french fries today and they were so sweet.
Every Spring, I find potatoes that I missed digging up in the fall..they are still edible! I do not eat them, though, I use them as seed potatoes; especially, since they were "Pontiac Red" potatoes and I could not find any seed potato packages of them at the store. I have had "Reds" for the past three years that way.
That’s a lovely way of looking at potatoes.
I agree! I have a large raised garden bed with soil I've made from compost & other stuff I've added & it's so great for digging, that the most efficient way is to wait till recent rain has it at the right moisture level & then dig by hand. I put on a pair of washing up gloves so I don't get dirt under my nails & just go to town, digging the whole thing to nearly half a metre down, finding potato after potato. I do sweet potatoes, so I love the way they join to each other & trying to dislodge without snapping them & being able to follow the thin bits that join them as I go deeper & deeper, still finding more potatoes. Nothing better :) (well ok, maybe slightly better is what I have right now & will for the next few months, where there's so much variety & it's so thick that I have to "dig" through the folliage to find goodies like beans, cucumbers etc etc, that's pretty awesome too :)
@@lilaclizard4504 that sounds absolutely wonderful to me!
Russel Crowe teaching us how to garden. I love this.
In meridius
Or Ricky Gervais … 😂
I think something fascinating about the yield from the grocery store potatoes, is that they were bound for compost or the rubbish once they went bad, so the fact that what was otherwise rubbish at the time produced edible potatoes is so fascinating to me! I’ll have to try this for the forgotten potatoes at the bottom of my cupboard! Theres always a handful that end up at the bottom of the bin and don’t get discovered until too late! 😅
I 100% agree! 😊
Gmos they don't want you to grow your own food. You still will get some and it's better than wasting them but still.
Makes you wonder if the dump has a huge number of new potatoes growing
Don’t forget that the potatoes ae usually treated with groth inhibitors when bought in the U SA. and any produce that comes into the USA. Is radiated. Best if you can find Organic heirloom seeds or starts or potatoes. That way if you let a few plants go to seed you can save the seed to plant the following year. Remember God gave us everything we would ever need. Every living thing grows dies but reproduces naturally.👍🙏🏽🇺🇸✌🏻😎
The 1st year I grew potatoes, I just bought reds and yellows from the "whole foods" store and planted wrist deep with mulch. 6-8 lbs turned into 35-40 lbs. The next year, bought potatoes from the regular grocery store and I doubled the amount planted and got similar yields. The next year I did the same thing and, also, planted a package of seed potatoes. The store bought outshined the seed variety by two-fold.
Wow! That is encouraging to hear!
same here, old store boughts gone to sprouts gave my best yield to date
@@francesmcstay the mulch he used right there was straw.
You could try: a) on good soil¹ b) cut up potatoes leaving one eye in each 'seed' c) lay them on the surface d) cover with a few inches of straw e) cover straw with mesh so straw doesn't blow away and provide first drink f) remove mesh when a healthy set of leaves strikes (some people leave it as they have sufficient holes in the mesh) g) harvest crop after leaves wilt which should be just under the straw residue. There may be some necessity to cover any exposed spuds during growing (with another few inches of straw).
Watering as required.
Simple process, clean spuds, no ground pressure, no villainous prongs, roots stay in the ground doing good work for the next use of that soil.
¹ Not dug up, full of worms, bacteria, fungi and arthropods (soil life) as Regenerative Agriculture recommends.
@@francesmcstay Potatoes are almost foolproof. Give 'em a try. Cut your potatoes into chunks with a couple of eyes each and plant those chunks with the eyes facing up some 6+ inches deep and then just make sure they get watered every few days if it doesnt rain. Done. There are things that require more work, especially layering them, that will increase the yield, but just the basics will get you a decent crop. Just keep a gentle eye on them and if you see any potatoes exposed on the surface just cover them with a few inches of dirt.
The take home message is: plant store-bought spuds instead of throwing them out. Worth a shot! Thanks for the great video.
Just shows, if you got potatoes that you can’t eat, just plant them! Free food and no waste. I’ve purchased seed potatoes and love that you can grow potatoes you just can get in the store. 💕
Many store bought potatoes have been sprayed with a chemical known as chlorpropham to prevent sprouting. If you want to grow store potatoes you should look for Organic.
@Lory smith Hi Lory 👋 I hope my comment didn't sound as a form of privacy invasion your comment tells of a wonderful woman with a beautiful heart which led me to comment I don't normally write in the comment section but I think you deserve this complement. If you don’t mind can we be friends? Thanks God bless you….
Lol you’re welcome you can text me with my address on my profile
In the American west in the 1870s, an army wife wrote about her meeting with a wise, well liked Indian chief named Spotted Tail. He was chief of a band of Northern Cheyenne, and had his tribe settle down and work the land. One day she was hoeing out stones from her garden when Spotted Tail came to say hello. When he found out what she was doing, he told her not to hoe out the stones. He explained: "Sun heats stones, stones heat ground, ground heats potatoes and ready earlier." She wrote that the reason he was at the fort was to sell his early by 3 weeks harvest of potatoes to the army. She also wrote the next year she tried his method and harvested before anyone else.
I love stories like that. Thank you.
You’re doing a great thing by making these videos and teaching gardening for self sufficiency. God forbid if a famine happened , a lot of us would be clueless.
I love the comparison, but I also have found that old store bought potatoes do just as well as the expensive sprout potatoes. I got a pretty good harvest with them this fall. I never spend additional money, if I can use store bought items. I just love your garden and your outgoing personality. I am a big admirer of your videos.
That's it hey, I just use a few varieties from the shops. And then keep some of the harvest for seed. Always picking the best ones for growing. Dutch cremes go the best where I live it seems.
both sprout and store bought you can just put some of the harvested aside to replant for more yes? so really you only need to buy the sprout potatoes once correct? if so one would have a better quality as in the video the sprout potatoes did overall look better
I do the same, and get loads of potatoes from just a few cut up store taters that started sprouting. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I never find them all and have potatoes every year even if I didn't plant any that year. oops.
@HLTRON it always depends on the garden center u buy your seeds from and also on the soil u use/have. Where I come from the seeds in the garden centers seeds are a waste of money and time, using grocery store brought items always worked better and also the planting seeds that one gained in the previous year also worked always well. It is possible that your garden center might have good seeds, but that’s something that u need to figure out for your crops yourself. If you want to compare the options, do it. Use each in equal amount when seeding, check the yield at the end and see which worked best for you. There is no perfect result without trials and errors. But that’s exactly what makes gardening fun😉 oh btw if you live in a region with cold winters, like freezing winter, then only plant potatoes in the same crops every 4years to prevent the potatoes getting sick from bacteria and mold.
One small thing, in our store here they sell regular potatoes and "organic". They spray the regulars with some kind of soap or something so they do not sprout, so they have less store loss. The organics sprout and grow nicely. I had about 5X yield even with the rabbits eating the greens.
I grow my spuds in pots. I used to grow them in raised beds, but you always seem to leave a few (or many) behind. In pots, I upend the pots on a tarp when it’s harvest time and can gather my spuds easily. I grow a mix of seed and store potatoes this way and usually get plenty. I can also grow spuds in pots all year round - temperate zone.
Gail, how large/deep are your pots and how many potatoes do you plant per pot? Tipping out on a tarp seems like the best way to find them all and without the risk of spearing them.
@@wyominghome4857 Most of my pots are elbow to finger tip wide and about the same deep (the big black ones), but not all of them. I use whatever is available. In the big pots I plant 3 or 4 potatoes, yielding up to 30-40 at harvest. The smaller the pot, the less I sow. I make my own growing medium of about 1/3 coconut coir, 1/3 perlite or vermiculite and 1/3 compost and a few worms from the worm farm. After harvest, I never use the mix for potatoes again, but recycle it to my raised beds. That way, I don’t get potato diseases. Hope this helps.
@@gailadler7823 Elbow-fingertip informal measurement, very Aussie, i like it😅
@@wyominghome4857 I’ve grown them in 25 gallon grow bags before. They did great.
@@michelifig6356 there is a UA-cam channel for the battleship New Jersey, where the curator uses proportions of himself to describe measurements “this is about 1/2 a curator long”for example.
I loved your video telling us to save green potatoes for planting. We had an epic harvest this year because I had enough to plant without buying any from the nursery. Thanks for all of your good information!
I never knew people buy seed potatoes 🥔 lol I've always planted them by buying the kind at the store I wanted, then letting them sit under a cupboard and eye out. Then I quarter them wherever there's a sprout or cut chunks so there's a sprout every chunk and plant in raised hills
I think the wrist seed potatoes had the most baking potatoes because the size was generally larger potatoes. The middle would be good for cut mixed veggies baked with olive oil and garlic (great for small potatoes) and I agree with the last comment that using the old potatoes means everyone can grow a good pile of potatoes even without a lot of money. Thanks, Mark! I have a big pot that I'm going to put a few potatoes in.👍
100% agree with your comment!!
Thanks for taking the time for a comparison of methods. Exactly what I was looking for, and really well done. Five stars, my friend!
The row/drill method seed potatoes do look like it is higher yield, but the seed potatoes you planted wrist deep look like they grew a larger potato. I think those were the most successful. If I had to do it again, I'd grow them that way but earlier in the season.
#3 made larger potatoes, with less work tha #2 I assume. I'd use that method for good seed stock, and put grocerystore taters in leftover spaces.
He said it was "late in his season" which I assume this video is recent so it's summer there, which (even his winters) is too hot to really produce well. (one of the major keys for mass production) when potatoes are growing lots of greens it's a lot of energy is going into that, you can see the market ones put majority of their energy into the potatoes. You can grow big plants and focus on their veg cycle (you can do this by lower light per day, more soil moisture, cooler temperatures, and most importantly more potassium nutrient input than nitrogen) because mark's gardens are always very nitrogen rich, most plants that are healthy will be focused on vegetation growth (best for any plants you directly eat leafs etc of) and in his potatoes case he was interested in the fruit growth.
I don't think so. All things being equal, if the same number of seeds were planted, the middle pile of seed potatoes produced many more potatoes! even though they weren't as large. It could be that in pile one fewer potatoes were planted and the ones planted had more space between them which allowed them to grow bigger. Therefore, since the row method produced more, I would use THAT method but space the "seed" potatoes farther apart so like they were in pile #1.
@@emilybh6255 in the second one he planted way many more potatoes than on the third or first raise bed. Taking that into account, the third bed did the best.
Watch the video again. The middle raise bed he left no separation between potatoes in the row. The "fist deep" raised beds were about a foot apart.
@@PRDreams Read the second part of my comment again. I agree the first method grew the biggest potatoes but the fact remains the row /trench method produced a greater number of potatoes. If you think about WHY the first method grew the biggest ones, the obvious answer has to be spacing. Therefore, to increase the harvest, use the method that produced the largest number BUT MODIFY IT to increase the space between each seed. That way you should be able to get the best of both methods. Also, you missed where I said "all things being equal" where I meant, the same number of seeds were planted in each bed.
My fifth grade teacher was a gardener and she had us all grow pole beans in cups. We transferred them to the ground after they were a few inches tall and mine grew really tall. This was in the 60’s and I loved that woman very much. Many years later I saw an article in the news paper about her. She was a master gardener. Her name was Ava Sue. 55 years later I still think of her when I eat pole beans. The small potatoes made me think of eating pole beans and little potatoes cooked together. My only claim to fame growing potatoes was once planting a 50 pound bag of red seed potatoes and harvesting 300 lbs. Only once! I’m getting ready to build my wife some raised beds for salad greens so I find your channel encouraging. I wish I could find the same kind of metal containers you have but I don’t think they exist here in the States. Thank you for sharing and bringing back some memories. Greetings from Alabama, US. Bless you and yours , Robert.
Birdies beds! I hope you found them!❤
@@JennTN411 I did, thank you for your reply.
Epic gardening!
Home Depot in California carries these metal containers now😊
Btw commercially grown potatoes are sprayed w pesticides a lot! Before planting the ground is sprayed with it, then as they grow, the plants are sprayed, then sprayed and irradiated again after harvesting to prevent sprouting- best to grow your own organically 😊
I like those raised beds. Gives me an idea of what to do with some old metal roofing.
I've even been comparing different (old, starting to decay/root) potatoes from different supermarket sources. I've kept some of the best ones for seconds, and we now use these every year, it's like its DNA is so strong, it just will not fail over here in The NL (Europe). We're at the 3rd generation of once too old to eat organic potatoes from one of the largest supermarket chains (Ahold/AH), and they still deliver by far the best yields and best tasting ones too. We get about 20 of them out of 1 semi-rotten old one. The most important trick I use is I let the old ones sprout half under water in our freshwater (indoor) aquarium. As soon as the green leaves start to show I plant them in the soil. They then already have lots of roots in the aquarium water. I've heard that by doing this you give them such a well-fed start, lots of potassium, kali and nitrates from the fish, that this is why they deliver such high yields. 1 -> 20 is pretty damn efficient!
Never heard of this method, and we just happen to have a goldfish tank! So you just stick them half in the tank water? How do you keep them in place? Do they effect the water parameters much? I've only just saved my fish from a nitrite spike (one passed from poisoning though) so I guess I'm a bit overcautious now. Thanks if you can get back!
@@kittenonacloud1012 I would imagine spear the potato on a stick that crosses the aquarium. Theoretically the potatoes should consume excess nitrates in the water and help prevent algae overbloom so long as your filtration system is adequately converting ammonia to nitrites and then to nitrates, although I've never tried it myself.
That's a really interesting idea. I have a large aquarium so I might give that a try. Do they just float in the tank or do you have to do something to keep them half submerged.
do you bury the whole potato or leave the green leaves showing? thanks
I am glad you did this. I always plant from store bought now, have for over a decade. I can get 50 pounds of potatoes from the store for anywhere between $7.99- 14.99 depending on time of year and variety. Seed potatoes here average $3-5 a pound. The old store bought seem to always give me a better harvest also.
Try this, it will cost less, let the potato sprout spuds, then shave those spuds off with just a little meat making it a flat surface on the bottom, you let the potatoes sit under a cabinet or in a dark closet with no water for a few days or so to allow them to do this. Then after you cut them off you do this again for a few more days to let them get ready to plant. Then you plant them with the flat side down 4 to 6 inches down 18 inches apart. You get more plants from less potatoes! :)
I have planted potatoes from my kitchen that had sprouted and shrivelled. I was always thrilled with the results. I just dug a hole and stuck them in my garden, and got enough to make few decent meals from each potato.
It’s better than throwing them away.
I am from the USA, the Pacific Northwest region. The method of choice for sowing potatoes is to always plant them 4 inches deep in very rich soil. No mulch. We wait until the plants are well established before adding mulch. Then we always wait until the green tops of the plants are good and dead, no green at all, before harvesting.
PNW here too, precisely how I was taught. Bin or bag growing simply adds space to my garden and easier on me physically for doing harvest, but I still do the same basics.
What soil is richer than mulch?
@@healanimatthews1140 good rich Willamette Valley soil. Stick a crowbar in the ground and it will grow nails.
@@LORIJUDD2151 Oh Hi! I’m new to gardening, I will appreciate your suggestion on this . Should I plant in containers, raised garden beds or in the ground?
If you're using a tato to grow a tato cut them into chunks so each chunk has an eye.
I live in California and my local Costco store has had organic baby potatoes in the food section. It is a mix of a small yellow potato and a small red new potato. They chit very readily and I use them as 'seed potatoes'. They were only about $9 for a bag and because they are small, I don't have to cut them up or do any prep work before planting. Just let the bag sit around for a bit and then plant them out when I'm ready. The first year I planted about half and the other half became all wrinkly before I planted them out. They still grew good potatoes. I have noticed that actual 'seed potatoes' can be expensive so I thought this was a great alternative.
Thanks for your video, Mark!
I love those potatoes! Planting them as we speak. Hoping for a decent haul
Did they grow into bigger potatoes then then what you planted as? Sorry if this is a stupid question I’m a beginner and little knowledge.
$9.00. Holy cow, that's outrageous!
@@marydaleo3701 That depends on the size of the bag. Seed potatoes can be $9 or more for a single kilo, so the baby potatoes probably work out much cheaper.
I grabbed a bag for about $5 recently, put them in the grow bags, mulched and set them against the south side of my shed. Can't wait to see how they did!
Thank you for sharing this information! I'm using old grocery potatoes that chitted in my cupboard and I cut them up to quarters, dried them off for a week, I'll be planting tomorrow! Guess I'll try setting them in wrist deep & mulching! I appreciate your experience! ❤️
@@Sherrywright4557
Is it okay I asked some questions I’m a newbie in gardening . Your suggestion will be helpful please
I bought organic potatoes from Whole Foods and seed potatoes Lowes. I planted them both in 5 separate 10 gallon fabric pots. I added more soil as the leaves grew. I didn't know if they were determinate or indeterminate, so I just grew them all the same. I gave them plenty of water, fertilized every 10 to 14 days with inorganic fertilizer, over 8 hours of sunlight daily. I harvested them when most of the greenery died back. My results were not a much as I would've liked. Most were very small. Next year I'll be using 20 gallon fabric pots and more organic fertilizers:)
We like the little potatoes for roasting - drizzled with olive oil, and adding a little, salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Thanks for doing the 3-part comparison. Even though planting was done late in the season, you still got a decent haul! Best wishes from Kate in Olympia, WA - 12/5/2021.
We use big ones for roasting, cuz of the Peeling part that’s needed before cooking..the small ones we cook with the peel and after cooking one can pull of the skin alone, without wasting any of the potato flesh..is nice as side dish to fish
Hi, Alexandra. When we roast the little potatoes, we eat them - skins and all. No peeling. Best wishes, Kate
@@alexandrau6096 the smalls after cooked can be heated in a pan, with butter or olive oil, salt and dill. No need to waste time peeling.
Add rosemary, its delicious!
I love all your experiments. I guess it shows me that it is more important to just get out and 👍🏻 do it as to worry about how you are doing it ( as the perfect gardener). Big 👍🏻 to you and thanks. 👍🏻
Last year I threw potato peels in compost pile and they sprouted like crazy so I dug up and put in container. Got a handful 0f small potatoes in a couple months. This year going to plant more seriously. I think your 2nd bed of potatoes had the biggest potatoes. Thank you for sharing. Enjoy your gardening and lovely land. Good tips!!
I often plant supermarket potatoes using those that have sprouted eyes and have also found them to be productive - certainly productive enough for me, one old woman gardener, and they don't cost what seed potatoes do. I enjoyed the video - as always. Thank you.
Season 14 of growing potatoes for me this year in the mid-Atlantic eastern US. I tried 10 gallon grow bags this time and results were average, however, the bags kept bugs out of the medium and it was fun & easy to just dump the bags to harvest, no more cutting them with a shovel! I also used a dehydrator to preserve them, which worked out really well.
This year we planted yukon golds from the grocery store with the drill method and have harvested 11 lbs off the first 2/3rds of the crop.. I'm guessing it'll end up being about 17 lbs total. I think using a tall container might get a better yield, using the 'thirds' method; fill the container 1/3rd of the way up for the initial planting, let them grow, add another 1/3rd of the soil, let them grow, then add the final 1/3rd of soil. We did that a couple years ago with great results.
Bone meal and blood meal works wonders also potatoes love acidic soil so peat moss is your friend.
Doesn't this method only work with certain types of potatoes?
Did you grow them inside of old tires? Seems like it would be a good way to get the thirds done easily.
@@J4Julz nah the first time I just used 5 gallon buckets from the hardware store and the 2nd time I used 15 gallon plastic pots I ordered from a garden supply place.. I actually had a better yield from the 5 gallon buckets, but I think that was my fault for not planting them at the best time.
Personally I'd be paranoid about using tires because of the material, but it's probably not as dangerous as I imagine. Otherwise not a bad idea.. it would certainly keep the plants in the sunlight instead of down in a container.
@@J4Julz if you look into using tyres to grow potatoes, you’ll find that it’s not good as heavy metal toxins are known to leech in to the soil.
Finally! A video about something I can grow here in Iceland :D
Thanks for making your content, a lot of quality information accompanied with great humor.
I enjoyed seeing the results from different methods
Great video, I planted my first set of potatoes this year, looking forward to seeing how much I get
Love the comparison! From what I saw, it matches my experience.
Wrist deep method: More space between plants gives larger potatoes
Furrow method: More potatoes, but slightly smaller
Supermarket potatoes: Not the most productive, but a win no matter how much you get. A good way to limit food waste.
I think the first bed really produced a good amount considering these were potatoes that you usually discard. That harvest will produce several meals for a family, so it was a good effort. Overall, it gives us several options. Thank you.
Hi Darlene 👋 I hope my comment didn't sound as a form of privacy invasion your comment tells of a wonderful woman with a beautiful heart which led me to comment I don't normally write in the comment section but I think you deserve this complement. If you don’t mind can we be friends? Thanks God bless you….
Digging up potato’s is one of my favorite things. I do a deeper “writs method” twice as deep to avoid the green potatoes. I plant in grow bags also
I wish you would have grown the store-bought in The same way as the rows of nursery bought. Very nice by the way and helpful thank you!
Maybe you did this but to get the best storage out of the potatoes cut the vines like you did and let them sit for about two weeks. From an Idaho potato farmer. Helps set the skins and they'll bulk better.
Well Mark the seed potatoes buried wrist deep in the left most bed gave you the biggest spuds. The middle bed with the seed potatoes grown in drills gave you the greatest number of potatoes but most of those are small. The bed on the right with the dried-up left-over supermarket potatoes planted wrist deep did a splendid job for what you had to start with and a couple of nice sized spuds to boot. I would definitely go with the left bed, which had the nursery seed potatoes buried wrist deep, as the best overall producer of potatoes that I would like to cook with. What a great video with a spudly thumbs up.
We just pulled our first potato harvest up today. We were really happy with what we got and we just did the wrist method (but I didn't mulch due to being sick). Kids had a ball digging the spuds out lol. 1 variety didn't do well, but 2 others did so we are going to replant in a different bed in a week or so.
I'd say both the wrist and trench are equally as good.
J. J. H huh. hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. H BBC. 7
Started watching SSM then fell in love with gardening and homesteading. Now I’ve found permaculture and syntropic forestry. But all thanks to finding this channel.
That's a great story. Hope you also have found land?
Cheers from B.C. Canada.
I live in Maine (Bath), and Maine is definitely pro potato. Lobsters and blueberries might get most of the attention, but Northern potatoes are wonderful. My gram was a fabulous gardener, and she got our family through some pretty tough times. 💕 😃
🎉🎉😊
Watching a man on the other side of the planet growing potatoes, that's what the internet brought me
I still remember a good 40 yrs ago my father in law had a big garden. I had never eaten a home grown potato. They were far and away the best things I’d ever tasted. Along with his white half runner green beans.
fresh garden beans are the best :)))
This year will be my first year of gardening. Nobody on UA-cam has the charisma of character you portray in these videos. I'm so excited to use gardening techniques I've learned from you.
Your garden trial matches what I've discovered after doing many years of similar trials: successful home gardening is really simple. Thanks for posting.
Great videi mate. If you use store potatoes that have gone to seed and decide to cut them in half, some people recommend letting the cut face dry for a few days so it hardens and protects itself from rotting or infection. We accidentally grew some in a compost pile, the plants grew tall and gave us a good mixture of sizes. Happy to use anything that's being chucked out 😊
I planted eyes up peels from store bought potatoes that sat on the counter a bit long before use. I ate 90% of the mother potatoes and planted the rest this spring, only because I had the room and wanted to see how they did. I was very happy with my kitchen scraps. I have a whole nother meal now. 👍 Thanks
Interesting experiment! Thanks for taking us through it. I think the lesson here is that it’s better to plant SOMETHING, even funky old store-bought taters, rather than nothing. That’s a pretty good yield from shriveled old spuds most folks would throw out. And the spuds are bigger without the fussing of the traditional method of the middle bed. I go with Bed #3.
Thanks for sharing, great results. I only grown a couple of buckets starting at the bottom and filling as they grow, but it’s good to see the different techniques. Thanks again👍
Given a choice, and how I prepare potatoes, makes a ton of difference. If I wanted large taters to peel- the wrist seed potatoes, hands down, is the way to go, by their size. Not peeling the middle. But, the throw out taters didn't do bad, considereing they were headed to the compost pile or to the chickens. GOOD video! Thanks Mark!
My garden fork has that one dodgy tine too. Think it hit a rock one of the digging days last year! 🙂
We have a large family and get 10lbs of potatoes at a go. If they start to sprout heading into Spring we generally cut them in half and plant them in pods (circle of 6 about 2 feet in diameter) 8 ish inches apart and get enough potatoes in spring to make it from harvest till late winter.
Been watching you for years, your scientific methods are getting better & better!
The difference I see - and its the same result I have experienced - is that the biggest difference is not in the production, but in the amount of green potatoes produced by not "hilling" in the potatoes. You middle bed appeared to have almost no green potatoes - while the others had quite a few. Throw the green ones out and then compare the result and you would have a clear winner. And it's a combination of variety and method that makes this work. Some varieties are more inclined to surface, they need more hilling and more mulch.
i'm sure that if you started earlier in the season you'd see a larger portion of green potatoes in the non-furrowed version too :)
What is hilling ? Im brand new lol
@@chrissilliker8633 take soil from between the drills and put it on top of the drill after the potato plant breaks the surface. It keep tubers covered as weather erodes the drill. Therefore less sunburn and more room from tuber growth.
@@johnmacdonald5400 and what is a drill?
@@leighburville2717 drill is the same as hill, Where i live we use drill but we still call it hilling. Here you get a lot of farmer praise if you have nice straight drills.
The way I grew my (store-bought, eye sprouting) potatoes this last season was to cut most of the potato out and put the sprouting eyes in a thin dish with water for a couple weeks so a root system would begin to grow. Once that happened I planted the starter sprouts in half-gallon milk jugs with holes punched in the bottom for drainage. Got me some REALLY tall plants, with a long root system, and when I transferred them again (cutting up the jug to not traumatize the plant), into a bigger, deeper pot, it got me a really big yield. We buy the smaller red potatoes so the things are going to be smaller in general, but the average size was golf ball to tennis ball size, with a few on either side. This method gives you time to do a second rotation if you want.
Note: Keep an eye on the potatoes to see if any surface and immediately cover, because squirrels will nibble the things.
All this transplanting is extra work and unnecessary. I plant the eyes directly in the soil, with some small area exposed. That is after a night of air drying on a paper towel in the kitchen (shade).
Good to mention the squirrels. I'ma have to grow these bad boys in a secure location. Lots of squirrels near me
We don't have to worry as we don't have squirrels in Australia LOL
@@alinedeleandro123 no, but we have possums which is just as bad 😭😭
I love your videos! I've been veg gardening for about 7 yrs now, and I am still learning new things! I've learned so much about gardening from you! All the way in North Texas, USA!
I am getting ready to set up my fourth raised bed that will be for potatoes. I bought seed potatoes from my local nursery. I'm going to try the trench method.
Keep up with the awesome videos and gardening!!
I’m glad to see that supermarket potatoes do so well for basically being leftovers. I ordered some indeterminate potato varieties to try this year. We are going to build up the sides of the bed and keep hilling them to see what happens. I love to try new things, too.
You only use trenches for indeterminate potatoes and bury them as they grow because the will produce potatoes all along the buried stem. Those types need a much longer growing season to get a full harvest, 90 to 100 days. Determinate varieties can just be buried when you plant them and will produce potatoes just below the surface at one level, no need for trenching. They also have a shorter growing time. Rule of thumb for potatoes is when they bloom you are likely getting little new potatoes below the soil and when the plants die back it’s time to harvest. You have to know the variety you are planting in order to look up which type they are. Nice experiment, though and you got a lot of potatoes for growing them in the heat. I would store the green ones for seed for next time.
Thank you! Your explanation helps me realize probably why mine were a flop last year. I planted organic potatoes that I bought at the store... they always chit before I can get to them all, so why not plant them. Part of the issue, I believe, was the organic soil I bought had been compromised, because it turned various seedlings yellow, which may have stunted growth. I have no idea if they are determinate or indetermininate, but the potatoes I planted likely needed much more time either way.
@@joanies6778 your welcome.
Tracy I didn't know that about the determinate and indeterminate. Now I know why, when I dig potatoes, some are deep and some aren't. I will look up the varieties. Thanks heaps 👍
Wow! Thanks! I had no idea that there were two kinds of potatoes, just like tomatoes, I guess.
@scout I'm in the Chicago area. The challenge I have is storing potatoes between harvest and the start of the colder weather. Once it gets cold outside, I can store the potatoes in the attached garage which keeps them between 40 and 50 F but right after harvest, I keep them in the basement which is between 60 and 65 F. The basement is a little warm for storing potatoes. A proper root cellar would be nice.
Hey Mark thanks for making these videos. I'm 37 and got into gardening slowly over the last 10 years. It's extremely rewarding and enjoyable to work outside, shape the land, and actually create things. Dad and I just watched this video, as well as a few others. I didn't grow potatoes last year since I tried some other things, but I'm going to give them another go this upcoming 2022 season after watching this. I've been doing well with pretty much whatever I try growing, although there have been some failures. A mistake I often make is I plant certain things too close. It's a lesson I've learned, though. My new concentration is composting natural material off the property and working on the soil quality. I've been doing that for two years now and will continue that into the future every year. We live in the state of Wisconsin - a small town between Lake Michigan and Lake Winnebago.
Oooh, Wisconsin--lots of cows, lots of poo, lots of compost!
Love your video's, One request. When you talk about " planting at the end of the season " could you tell us what month you did this and then maybe tell us the perfect time to plant. I know you might do this in other video's but it saves having to "dig" back for info . Cheers.
I agree :)
If he's Australian, he'd be telling you the wrong month to plant in the Northern Hemisphere. Although you could probably extrapolate it out by adding six months.
And if you live somewhere equidistant from both you're just screwed cause it could be 3 or 9 off
Thanks for taking the time to bring us along on your experiment!
I grew potatoes for the first time this year from potatoes that I didn't eat fast enough and ended up with an alright amount from what I planted. Left all the green ones in the garden bed and ended up with another handful just recently. Happy with my results considering I was originally going to toss them in the compost. Liked seeing the experiment with the different potatoes and growing methods.
Po-tay-toes! Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew. Lovely big golden chips with a nice piece of fried fish. Great crop mate! Start of summer at mine too in QLD, about to get my harvest, very excited 👏☝️🧑🌾👍
I love how a potato growing video brings people together, everyone should make potato videos so we can have unity and word peace😆🤣😅
Damn, we should have gone through with your plan, Putin would have been too occupied with his backyard potato farming results to have time to mess with Ukraine
Everyone loves a good potato!
@@sidmac50 I'm hungry for some potato salad now. Or maybe a baked potato with cheddar cheese and bacon.
You're so right..... world potato peace rings true for me! If every one made potatoes instead of trouble... just imagine eh
But then we will start with our potato cannons, someone will form a potato ballista and it will just become a primitive war based in potato.
I appreciate all of your experiments. My potatoes were rubbish this year, which was my fault alone. I tried growing them in a small raised bed and there wasn't enough room. I grow german butterball indeterminate and a few Yukon golds. I will go back to the tall trash can method next year. Its cold and winter here in the midwest, USA and I enjoyed seeing you in the warm sunshine! I can't wait for spring!
I had the same issue with the little leftovers of the german small potatoes this year. At first I their was cuz I asked a friend to watch over and water them for me while we were moving and renovating. Ours had a lot of room but it was less then half a hand full of way to small potatoes, can only use them as food for our scampi..turned out the friend forgot about them on his balcony and did not water them during the hottest time of the year, I thought that was the reason, but reading you had the same issue I guess it was cuz of the potatoes themselves..srsly never had such a small harvest........
Hi January's 👋 I hope my comment didn't sound as a form of privacy invasion your comment tells of a wonderful woman with a beautiful heart which led me to comment I don't normally write in the comment section but I think you deserve this complement. If you don’t mind can we be friends? Thanks God bless you….
Thank you so much freind, for your hard work, and bringing smiles to so many! From Baudette Minnesota
I have decided to grow some potatoes this year - my first time - and this was the perfect video for me to see. I had been over-complicating things with all sorts of questions in my head. Now I realise I just need to get on with it. Thanks!
Thanks for the video, I think the yield and quality will be much better if you plant the seed 10 centimeters deeper. Then you have a better buffer with moisture, and less green and more tubers. And what I'm missing are the red Desiree potatoes you planted.
Good morning Mark, we have had our second harvest since we started our garden last April and we have used the canvass buckets and the standard birdies beds. We are going to give the bags a miss next year and stick to the standard beds. Our best results have been with certified seed potatoes. And we are near Toowoomba where its a lot cooler
Thank you for this video, I really like asking questions and setting up experiments to find answers. I thought the store bought seed potato beds would at least double the grocery potatoes and I was happy to see the grocery potato's did as well as they did. Thanks again.
I am going to try to grow some potatoes this year. I plan to plant them a little later than normal because the cold here seems to last longer. I'm going to plant them in cardboard boxes and we will see how much I get. It's just an experiment. I live in a mobile home park, so, space is limited.
Something is always better than nothing! Great job Mark, I'll continue to plant all my rogue chitters, plus my designated seed spuds. Much love from Western Australia x
Thanks for making Australian Gardening videos :) I would love to see someone make a series of "what to plant in the month of x". I always feel like planting something when I watch your videos but I'm not sure what is the best crop for this time of year here
Unfortunately there's not much in the way of hard and fast rules with gardening like that. Most of it depends on where your located, someone in Michigan or Scotland will have very different planting schedules than someone in Australia or Texas, the number of days in your "growing season" average temperatures, soil composition and a bunch of other factors all play a part in when and how to plant things.
Starting the day with a SSM video is a great way to do so!
Cheers from the west indies Mark! Lots of things in common with you here, including the love for rosella...
Just discovered this channel for me. You are like a seasoned dad who teaches us kids how things work and I love it!
I also never knew that Potatoes can vary so much in colour? Does it do anything with the taste or firmness?
Good to know that even the oldest store potatoes can be of use - I think rom all three methods I would prefer the 2nd method the most (the one on the left); those seem to grow fewer but larger tubers!
I like the left hand side myself because although the seed potatoes were the same as the middle it’s less labor than doing drills and it looks like there’s a lot of bigger spuds. Having a big haul of smaller potatoes is a pain to clean for months on end in my experience so I prefer a mix of smaller and bigger depending on the recipe.
Another potato idea: potato tower. Cut barrel or something similar into 20 cm tall rings. Fill the first one with soil and plant a potato there. When it will sprout then add another ring and fill it with soil, but don't burry all the leaves. Repeat. Buried stem will produce potatoes. Some say it can increase yield up to 3 times. Good idea for confined spaces, yet needs more water.
Another variant are hessian bags. Fill the bag to the half with soil, roll down the edges and plant a potato. After sprouting cover the stem with soil and roll up bag's edges a little bit ect. Harvesting is much easier: just flip the bag.
No it's just don't work. Potato tower is a nonsense that everybody repeat but nobody tried. You can find on internet why it's not true.
Don't worry I also believed in this.
@@krzysztofrudnicki5841 It's not about magically grow tons of potatoes. It surely is hard to believe in 3x more potatoes. If it was the case then farmers would plant using only this method. It is more like making possible to grow potatoes in confined spaces, i.e. balcony or small garden. Nevertheless thanks for pointing it out, I'll try this method next season and share the results.
You have to use an indeterminate potato.
A good experiment. I was surprised at the "dodgy" store bought potatoes, not a bad haul, really. Considering the seed source.
I love this! I have grown potatoes with some hit and miss. We grew up just cutting potatoes that had sprouted eyes and cut them into quarters. My grandpa used to stack old tires and fill with soil and layering the cuttings then soil then cuttings. When it was time to harvest, we would tip over the tire stacks and pick out the potatoes. That worked very well without having to use a pitchfork so we didn't damage any I like your drill method and am going to try that. Thank you! Great video.
It was interesting results. Based on these results, if you're handicapped as I am the difference between the seed potatoe results I would do the bury them and leave them as it would require less output from me.
@@kellimacgregor1909 I am handicapped.. MS, Psoriatic Arthritis, fibromyalgia and PTSD.
This video had everything. Suspense, drama, humor. Thanks for your hard work. Great to see which worked best.
SO listening to your advise about where to plant potatoes. I was attempting to save some from dying of dehydration so I could plant them in something. I was looking for a container in other words. Days go by without finding a container... just kept adding water to try to keep them alive. Apon watering them the third day. None of them are wrinkled anymore, and all of them are going nuts in the clear container with only water in them. NOW TO KEEP MY STINKING CAT FROM PULLING THEM OUT OF THE CONTAINER BECAUSE SHE THINKS THEIR TOYS FOR HER... I found one in my living room one morning. They are in the kitchen window, in the small container, to catch the morning sun.
It depends on whether you were growing indeterminate or determinate varieties as they grow differently. Determinate will only give you a set number of spuds in one layer on each plant and don't need hilling, while indeterminates grow in several layers and will produce a lot more and do need hilling. at least some of the supermarket ones were probably indeterminates as they were pushing out of the soil trying to grow in layers. It's hard to say without knowing whether you're growing determinates or indeterminates or a mix of both. To see what you'd really get, you probably need to grow all determinates or all indeterminates (or the same number of plants of each) to make a proper comparison. still a nice haul altogether for future dinners!
Thanks for mentioning that because I didn't know they come in determinate or indeterminate. Now I will have to check to see when I plant next spring as that will determine whether to hill or not.
@@anneciamartin9514 yes, it's good to know whether you're growing determinates or indeterminate as using the right method will give you better results. It can be hard to find out which are which with some varieties though which is frustrating bUt there are lists available if you do a bit of research
And what they call produce in the supermarket is not necessarily the same thing as what it's called in the seed catalog or garden center. I like the Red Bliss potatoes in the supermarket because they can be used so many ways but what are they called at the garden center or in the seed catalog. I think Yukon Gold is the same thing which is another nice multi-use potato.
interesting info, thanks for sharing, I didn't know about in/determinate potatoes until reading another comment & had no idea what it was on about until you just explained it perfectly, so thank you :)
I've always just popped them into the ground and covered them.
Ruth Stout used to just drop them on the ground and throw straw over them.
Ive used shop-bought potatoes almost exclusively, because I couldnt rationalize the cost of "seed" potatoes over the shop-bought.
I reckon most people just put too much energy into growing potatoes - they are one of the easiest, self-managing food plants you can grow.
How many time needed to Grove those potatoes?
As long as potatoes have good drainage they are pretty easy.My first time growning potatoes i had a decent yield and i was clueless .
thats right - they almost grow themselves,
They have particular needs for temperature, but as long as its not too hot or too cold, they do well.
Exactly why the Irish relied on them, easy and nutritious
@@dahutful the magic numbers 55 to 68 degrees .The magic soil peat moss potatoes love acidic soil.
I planted store potatoes too last year (from the skin not whole potatoes)
We just finished using them ( they were like 3 kilos)
I dug the garden under the grass next to the fence (renting and not allowed to plant 😜)
My daughter loved exploring the plants and seeing how they grew
They weren't much nor big
But will keep doing this for now
that's just horrible to not be allowed to plant cause you're renting!!!!!!! I couldn't live like that!
@@lilaclizard4504there is a dry spot in the grass i planted a small basil and some herbs , and last year i planted some potatoes under the lawn grass (it wasn't that successful but we loved it)
We don't plan to stay this way forever
@@zk.13 that's just so sad though that a landlord could have the power to tell you you can't have a garden :'( Can you do anything with pots? Or are there limits on them too, cause they'd cill the grass they were sitting on?
Have a look at kratky hydroponics, you might be able to do that, especially for stuff like herbs. It's basically putting some holes in the top of a milk bottle to let air in to the top of the roots, while filling below with hydroponic nutrients & the plants grow in that. I use it quite a bit cause it's really space efficient & my garden space is small, but could be good in your setting too & the milkbottles are really easy to move around as needed. Make sure you use proper hydroponic nutrients if you do it, a lot of people don't, but in my experience there's a HUGE difference in growth with & without that
All the best in moving though, would be so much better to have control over your garden wouldn't it!
@@lilaclizard4504 i appreciate the tips and reply :) i do plan on putting pots in the driveway if we're staying at this property
Our landlord is the worst, but the house is spacious and the kids like the yard to play
Thank you
@@zk.13 large house & yard are good :) Just sad you can't grow stuff :( I'll bet you have to mow the grass too do you? yard responsibilities, but no control over what's in it :'(
Try the kratky :) should work well in the settings you have :) Only for above ground veggies & herbs, potatoes etc don't work in it, beans are a really good starter one I found, huge yield from a tiny footprint. I put each of the bean plants into a 1 litre milk bottle, with plants like chillies in 2 litre instead
We usually put the potatoes about 8 inches deep and at least 10-12 inches apart. We had dirt to the rows twice during the year so the plant has lots of space to grow under.
In my opinion, probably less crop due to the spacing. Only so much space for the plants to grow 6 inches deep and maybe 8 inches apart.
Lastly, I would also add the supermarket patch also had red potatoes that only grow to small sizes usually half of the more common potato. We called those red ones in my parts of Canada we called garden potatoes that we use as a side with butter and salt or in salads.
You said, "sometimes you just gotta have a go." That's exactly how I approach gardening. What's it gonna hurt anyhow, plus the knowledge you gain from just trying something is invaluable.
Good morning ☀️ very interested to see the results of this. I'm going to start some next week. Let's get into it!
I live in Alberta, Canada and one year, the snow came fairly early in the fall and it ended up staying for the winter. There were at least 80 hills of potatoes in my garden that never got harvested that fall. Of course over the winter, everything was frozen solid (we get -40 here) and in the spring, all of the potatoes turned into mush which I roto-tilled into the soil. The garden production over the next three years where the frozen potatoes were mixed in with the soil was absolutely incredible. All of the potatoe hills were producing over 20 decent potatoes per hill and some were more than 30! That got me thinking about using a cover crop of potatoes to organically fertilize a field for barley the following year. Even considering losing a year on the field, I think that it would still be cheaper than buying fertilizer and you end up with a premium organic product that would definitely be in demand, especially if it was good enough for malt barley.
Have you thought of doing diakon radish as a cover crop?
-40... is that C of F ??? !!!
@@pappyfiddle -40C :)
@@falsnamae3511 oh! !!! I guess that’s why Elliott didn’t specify lollll. Oops! I never bothered to learn F and didn’t know that. Learn something new everyday :) I was thinking it’d be about -25F :) ty for that!… I also didn’t know until a couple of years ago that New England isn’t a state! That news was a shocker lol. The USA is full of surprises :)
@@farstrider79 i was just going to say this. The farmers around here have been planting diakon "tiller" radishes to help break up deadpan from so many years of plowing in older fields. Plus the composting radishes really seem to boost soil health.
Plus. They are pretty tasty. My freind farmer Dave called his buddy and got permission for me to dig a few to eat cuz they are $2 a lb in the store. They were so good. Plus the darn things were as big as my leg! Lol.
I even pickled some Japanese style with soy and miso. Took to the farmer and let him taste it. He was shocked. He figured they would taste bad. We harvested right after first frost but before it started freezing.
They are really good cubed and roasted too. Like turnips.
I grow spuds in southern Germany in recycled store-bought compost bags, punctured and put on slatted wooden stands to aid drainage. It has worked very well for years, giving much bigger yields in proportion to soil than any plantings in the ground or raised bed. And dead easy to harvest . You just tip the bags out onto a potting table, and then recycle the soil with a bit of added blood and bone, lime and manure for great results with peas, pumpkins, tomatoes, melons, peppers, chili plants next year. Spuds do grand things to soil.
Results were good for years until last year. This year we had a never ending northern hemisphere winter freeze, giving us frosts into early June. Not experienced within living memory. And then a cool wet summer, and early autumn rainy chill. So yields from plantings in the brief March thaw, were much lower than usual. Plants need warmth, sun, and CO2, a vital nutrient.
Potatoes, like strawberries (disaster crop here this cold, cloudy, wet season) don't need much soil. But they they do need loose slightly acidic soil (do not add lime!). They are happy if they have about 8 inches of good compost soil mix under them, and 8 inches over them. I have found that banking up around the surface greenery doesn't make any difference. It's just unnecessary work.
I have heard and read on mainstream media here that this summer, 2021, has been the "warmest on record" in the northern hemisphere. Not on my records. And I have been here, in England and Germany, for nearly 70 years. Trust your own senses, your own experiences. Only you know reality.
Thanks Mark. Sorry to have gone on a bit. You are clearly, what we in northern England, call "a good un". And you know your stuff. Thanks for the great videos. Cheers, mate.
I agree, at the end of august the weather was freezing like 20years ago(back then autumn started at the end of august, I know it cuz a friends birthday is at the beginning of august and she was happy that it was still warm around her birthday to have a party in the garden while it’s already became to cold for that at the end of the month) I actually checked the weatherstations close by and it was freezing on my balcony but the weatherstation was telling it would be 18•C but it was below 5•C according to the thermometer I have...maybe it’s cuz I live quite low and most weatherstations are quite far up? In Russia/Siberia pipes are adjusted 2m above the ground, the reason : if they bury the waterpipes in the ground like Germany does the water in them would freeze, but by having them above the ground the cold stays on the ground and the pipes don’t freze...maybe that’s why we have misinformation on temperatures...
I do trust my own senses, instincts, and my own reality.
Hope things are going ok for you in Southern Germany.
Reminiscent of the early 30's in Germany here, where I live.
"Mass psychosis" prevails.
I made the decision not to escape, prior to being prevented from doing so, by discriminatory "government health mandates".
Am riding it out. On the land.
Cheers and Merry Christmas from the "true north" but it's no longer strong, and no longer "free".
hilling up while growing covers those near the surface so they do not get green
You are awesome, I learn how to plant because of you. Keep those videos for more people to appreciate
I just adore those little potatoes boiled whole... with lots of butter!
One thing people can also try is I've noticed potatoes growing from the peels i've discarded in the compost pile. So you don't even necessarily need to plant whole potatoes, if you've got some scrap peels try putting them in soil with some compost and they might sprout.
100% true!! This what people used to do! No wastage whatsoever.
Every single "eye" will produce potato plant.
That was a good test. It's best to know if your potato variety is determinate or indeterminate. Determinate or early varieties normally set the tubers at one elevation and do not benefit much from hilling. Indeterminate will continue to grow and will benefit from hilling and normally, in my experience, make more taters.
Good morning, good to see your work in the video. Would you consider removing half of your soil in your potato containers, shifting the remaining soil to one side, adding leaves and brown matter to compost and layering it with soil up to 2/3 of the bed during your period of bed rotation and rejuvenation? Since potatoes seem to grow on the top of your beds perhaps you can reduce the height of your beds and start lower in the beds and add the rejuvenated soil as the potatoes grow? The method of adding the nutritious soil to the potatoes is referred to a hilling it. you can mulch as you go along for water retention, however you would need to use your soil as you need it.
This is what i do. and i add borage leaves since they have a ton of potassium. i read a stud that showed adding potassium increases the yeild by 50%
You could probably just water with fortified compost tea and achieve the same thing - or better if you fortify the tea with sea veggies and certain herbs like Comfrey and Nettles.
@@emilybh6255 yes this is a great idea :)
Mark has said in previous videos that he uses the height of his beds to help out his back, so I would guess reducing the height of his beds would not be an option. Also he uses hügelkultur methods in his beds.
The "Ruth Stout" or "no dig" method uses straw as the compost above her potatoes, there's an old video on UA-cam that shows her planting and harvesting. ua-cam.com/video/GNU8IJzRHZk/v-deo.html
@@A_nony_mous Additionally I think he had them growing/starting out in winter didn't' he? So with the angle of the sun, half way down the bed would potentially not even give any direct sun for the first month or 2 of growing, which presumably wouldn't be good for them
Howdyyawl from the land down under. Potatos, yum. Doesn't matter how many that are harvested. They'll all taste good. Saves buying them. Gettig back to a earlier video that you showed tje bread you made. Looked very nice by the way. I've got 2 ploughnan loaves in the oven now. My own recipe. About to come out of oven. It's all good fun. Keeping it real 😊
I would loved to see this experiment with decent supermarket bought spuds rather than really rough ones. Great to watch though and thanks heaps!
It works well.
Would be interested in a taste comparison! Even though the drill method produced the most, the seed/wrist crop had a larger average size so was probably the best! great job, keep it up