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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 2, 2020 21:07:30 GMT -6
Nice Jesse! Thanks, for sharing those photos.
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Post by mountianj on May 27, 2020 17:16:49 GMT -6
french fingerling potatos red pontiac kennebec potatoes seems be doin good
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 29, 2020 13:55:59 GMT -6
Great looking garden, Jesse! Wish I was there.
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Post by macmex on Jun 17, 2020 3:47:27 GMT -6
I'd harvest any time now, if they're turning. I don't know how much they're turning, but I'd start once they're mostly yellowed.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 25, 2020 19:31:26 GMT -6
I harvested over 200 pounds of potatoes last year in July, after the vines had died. I overwintered almost 50 pounds of them for seed.
I just had mine laying on bare ground out in the woods, covered with a tarp and about a foot of oak leaves. It's not typical for us to have such a mild winter, so they never were harmed by freezing solid and went to seed very readily in late February.
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Post by macmex on Jun 27, 2020 4:24:25 GMT -6
Bon, another option is to rely more on sweet potatoes. We're still eating from last September's harvest and will have another harvest in a few months. It's really easy to save enough sweet potato roots to replant, and they shouldn't be kept cool while in storage. They do great, not far from the wood stove.
Additionally, sweet potato greens are also good to eat, so one can be harvesting those during much of the summer.
Having said that, I still want both. Irish potatoes fill a somewhat different niche in our cuisine.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 4, 2020 3:07:44 GMT -6
In years past, I've seen my neighbor just use two cattle panels linked together to form a large circle in his yard to plant Kennebec Potatoes in. He cubed his seed potatoes and placed them at a certain spacing right on top of the ground, then just covered them with a deep layer of straw. That Fall, he raked the straw back and picked his potatoes right up off the top of the ground.
The potatoes had 'nested' themselves into the soil, about half of each potato was below grade, the other half, above grade, covered with straw.
It was such a wonderful idea that I tried it myself the next year; only my 150' foot long rows were not well suited for this type of gardening; as the neighbor's ring of cattle panels had served as a 'corral' to keep his straw in place ... High winds that year ravaged my straw, and of course, in early Spring, before the grass was growing; the neighbor's beef cattle thought my straw was their 'hay' and they broke the fence down to get into my garden to try to eat it.
Cows can't eat straw (It's not digestible) so they trampled it instead. Since my potatoes were above ground, they managed to find a few of them to munch on before I discovered them in my garden.
As a result, my straw was scattered all over creation and all I could do was rake it back in place and hope for the best.
My potatoes ended up at crazy spacing, but other than that, they did quite well ... Well enough to recommend my neighbor's method to anyone who would rather rake straw, looking for potatoes than to plow hardpan soil. I think that method would be well worth the effort if a person could employ some sort of way to 'corral' the straw. (All it would require would be a short fence) two foot chicken wire or dog wire would do the trick.
I won't likely try it again here, because of the poor fencing sitiation, but if I lived in town, I would definitely try it again.
I'm wondering if potatoes covered in dead leaves inside an enclosure would work much the same way?
Dead leaves are free, while good straw is expensive. I've had people donate truckloads of leaves to me before, just to get them raked out of their yards in exchange for my labor.
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Post by macmex on Jul 4, 2020 6:30:07 GMT -6
I remember when you did that experiment. You dropped by and showed me some of those nice, large, clean potatoes. Ever since then Jerreth and I have been doing something like it, and we are very happy with the method. We do potatoes in wide rows. First we cultivate so we have bare soil. Then we lay down our seed potatoes, in kind of a grid pattern. Then we cover them with enough mulch that one wonders if they'll ever find their way out. (They always do.)
We've used spent hay from animal pens and also leaves, which we pick up in town, when people are raking. Both things work quite well. I doubt we'll ever go back to the old way of planting potatoes. By the time we harvest the mulch is quite thin and we only need to rake it to the side to expose beautiful, clean potatoes, which only need to be picked up!
Here's a photo of our potatoes, growing in mulch (taken earlier in the season).
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 15, 2021 15:11:24 GMT -6
The Incredible Potato:
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 20, 2021 18:40:02 GMT -6
Pretty incredible results from planting potatoes in pots.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Dec 22, 2021 22:57:10 GMT -6
I'm guessing the guy in the video gets plenty of rainwater, being how potatoes are made mostly of water, but it was still a good reference video, showing a way to do things that I've never before tried.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 23, 2021 10:33:02 GMT -6
Yeah. No container potatoes for me, unless in a wicking bucket.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Feb 16, 2022 0:43:47 GMT -6
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