GROWING POTATOES IN RAISED BEDS
you can buy at the grocery store so sit back and enjoy today's episode on how to
grow potatoes in raised beds so our first step is to prepare the soil in our
raised bed we already have a lot of compost and organic matter added to the
soil and what we are doing here is adding some azomite which is volcanic
rock dust into a raised bed this will provide a lot of nutrients that the
plants need to grow and the potatoes should do very well with this added in
the soil now you need to make sure that this is very well mixed into your soil
and if you are using organic matter just make sure that you added well in advance
so that there's some time before they are available to the plants
and now let's start planting these potatoes
these are seed potatoes that you can find in your gardening stores garden
centers very easily now you can also buy potatoes from your grocery store and
plant them but just make sure that you're buying potatoes that have not
been sprayed by growth inhibitors and if you go to some organic grocery store
like Whole Foods or your local farmers market you might get those potatoes but
most of the grocery stores spray their potatoes with growth inhibitors and you
won't be able to grow them but the best choice is to buy these kind of seed
potatoes from the gardening centers they are mostly available around January here
in Southern California and what you do is you just plant them a few inches deep
and this method of growing potatoes is the hilling method where we will be not
planting the potatoes very deep but we will add more soil and Hill those potato
plants as they grow up now if you don't want to do that what you can do is plant
your potato sets very deep and I'm talking about like at least six to ten
inches deep and then cover it with soil and they will take time to grow but
that's an alternative way of growing potatoes which we will try in the next
season and these are the seed potatoes as you can see here and after about 42
days the plants will grow into new growth that you see here and at this
time it's a good idea to add some fertilizer you can add some complete
fertilizer like the one you see on the screen or you can use a tomato or
vegetable fertilizer they will grow very well and you can see that the plants
will continue to grow make sure that you choose a spot that receives at least six
to eight hours of sunlight every day and you want to make sure that your plants
get plenty of sunlight now here is one problem that you might see with growing
potatoes and these are the potatoes that grow above the soil level and we just
got a little delayed in healing these potatoes
and what we're gonna do now is try to salvage these by covering them with some
soil but you need to make sure that no potato grows outside or exposed to the
Sun and that'll make sure that you have potatoes that are not toxic and we will
talk a little later on how you should avoid harvesting these kind of potatoes
and this is the healing technique what we do is once the plants grew to about
four to six inches you can add some soil I am using some potting soil here you
can use compost you can use peat moss coco coir whatever you have available
some kind of organic matter that will protect these potato plants and by
hilling these potatoes what happens is that most of the potatoes that grow are
covered they are not exposed to the Sun and that way you get a better harvest
and you don't get potatoes that are toxic so this is a good way to grow your
potatoes when you are growing them in containers or raised beds but if you're
growing them in the ground or even on raised beds you can try planting them
deeper there's an alternate way to grow potatoes but in this hilling technique
we are adding organic matter as you can see here and trying to make sure that we
Hill each in every plant now let's talk about watering your paredo plants now
potatoes grow very well during the spring season which is not too hot and
not too cold so in Southern California the best time to grow potatoes is from
January through May and during this time you can water them every three days or
so during the growing season now when it's too cold or cloudy I try to not
what are the plants but usually when I'm growing potatoes I see that I usually
what are them about two to three times a week along with the other vegetables and
these are set up on a micro drip irrigation spray here as you can see and
potato plants do not like a lot of heat so you will see that by the time summer
approached your plants will start dying and that's
why it's better to plant them in around January or February depending on your
area in Southern California that's the time to start it and once you hill
your potato plants they will start producing potatoes very soon and if you
see that your potato plants are flowering that means they're doing very
well that's a healthy plant and the fact that they've also started producing
tubers or their potatoes and this season our potato plants did not grow like 100%
well they looked a little bit stressed and I think that's because we had a few
days of very high temps and then very low temperatures so that's probably why
our potato plants were not at their best and once you finish healing the potatoes
an important thing to do is to wash away the extra dirt that's there on the
plants that should make sure that your plant will get any kind of diseases the
soil that's left on the plants just make sure you wash them very well you water
them well now this time I grew potatoes only in the compost that I added to the
raised bed as well as the azomite I did not add any fertilizers to grow the
potatoes this time and we're gonna see how that works
now this potato plant is a variety that produces small potatoes it's called the
white superior variety of potatoes so it produces small to medium sized potatoes
and they're very delicious if you go to the grocery store next time check out
the potato varieties and look for the white superior varieties they will be a
little different from the other varieties that you see but they're not
as large as some of the other potato varieties like the russet potatoes and
some of the other varieties now as you can see here the potato foliage has
started to die at about 120 days you can see that a lot of the potato plants have
completely dry leaves and the plant is gone and I usually wait for about two to
three weeks after this to harvest the potatoes but I do like to dig them out
all at once so that I can have space for the next crop
so we're gonna be looking at how these potato plants grow in the next few days
we have stopped watering these potato plants as you can see here they're
pretty dry and this is because the potatoes need about two to three weeks
to grow before we start harvesting them so at 128 days we are finally harvesting
our potatoes you can see here more than half the plants have now died and when
we dig up the potatoes we are going to be finding the potatoes that have grown
around the plant now potatoes do not grow very deep into
the soil they do grow around the plants as you can see here and they are right
about at the place where we planted them a few inches deep and then the soil that
we hilled is something we're taking out right now and this once again is the
white superior variety of potatoes these potatoes don't grow very large like the
other varieties like the russet but they are absolutely delicious and when you
grow potatoes in your home garden and especially when you're not using any
pesticides or fertilizers or you're just basically just growing a potato by
planting it in the soil you can expect to get about three to four potatoes per
plant now if you get more potatoes that's good for you you've got a good
harvest and usually the yield is more when you're growing in native soil in
some areas but otherwise don't be disheartened if you don't get a big
harvest when you're growing plants at home you're able to experience the
freshness and goodness of growing these at home so it's not really a raise to
grow a bumper yield or a large harvest what you want to get is a decent harvest
which you can use consume within your family and of course if you have extra
you should be sharing that with your friends and neighbors as you can see
here we have begun harvesting and we still have a few plants to go and so far
it looks like a decent harvest and these are the potatoes that we harvested from
a 16 square foot raised now the volume is not that high as you
can see here and what we're going to do now is watch them very well
these are still quite a lot of potatoes that you know are at least our family
can consume for the next one or two months at least so it's a decent harvest
and we're not going to be storing our potatoes now we're gonna be consuming
all of these potatoes pretty quickly so after washing them all we're gonna do is
dry them a little bit in the Sun just so that they form a little bit of a cover
but you don't really need to keep them out for a long time now as you can see
here we have washed our potatoes and we're gonna put them back in this bucket
and here is how it looks like when it's dried and this is our harvest and it's a
pretty good harvest and they are absolutely delicious potatoes that will
serve us for a long time and these are the potatoes that I was telling you
about and these are green in color and they're not so good for you so if you
see such kind of potatoes just make sure that you discard them even if you have a
little bit of green on any of these potatoes they're toxic and they should
not be used
so there we have it folks that was our episode on growing potatoes using the
hilling method in raised beds let me know what kind of potato varieties you
like to grow and let me know if you have grown potatoes this season or are you
planning to grow them now and what varieties are your favorite varieties
we'll see you again soon happy gardening
