Potatoes Planted (finally)
This week we finally were able to plant our potatoes. This is pretty late in the season for us. Most years we’ve had our potatoes planted by mid-April but the weather had other plans for us. In this blog post we’ll go over the 3 varieties of potatoes we grow, how we plant them, and why getting them in this late really isn’t too big of a problem.
Potato Varieties
There are hundreds (maybe thousands?) of potato varieties world wide. We grow three of them. Our goals are to provide something familiar but more flavorful and also have something new for you to try while having potatoes available for as much of the season as possible.
Red Norland
This is your typical red potato. They’re soft and creamy and one of the first potatoes available in the season. Our ideal size is somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball. They are great any way you prepare them - I personally like them mashed or fried the best.
Cascade
This is your typical white potato. Very similar to a russet but with a much thinner skin. We like to grow these larger than red potatoes with ideal size being somewhere between an oblong baseball and softball. Because of their lower starch content these tend to fry up the best but are also great with any preparation method.
Amarosa
This is a fingerling potato which have become quite trendy in the culinary world in recent years. Fingerling potatoes are less round and more oblong and resemble fingers and their namesake. Amarosa fingerling potatoes have a pinkish red skin and pink flesh and they are absolutely divine roasted. They also make really good mashed potatoes. Our oldest daughter, Addie - 4, loves pink mashed potatoes!
How We Plant Potatoes
Prepare the soil: We apply fertilizer and use our field cultivator to prepare the soil for planting.
Make the furrow: We use our potato plow to dig a furrow.
Plant the potatoes. Did you know that the “seed” for potato is actually potato tubers from the previous season?
Cover them up!
We used to do almost all of this by hand but by making use of our potato plow and disc hiller attachments for our tractor we are able to drastically reduce the physical toil of this job!
Planting Late
The reason we were so late to planting potatoes this year is largely on account of the wet April we had. After about April 10th it was too wet to get out into the field with our tractor to plant potatoes. We decided to work on other tasks like transplanting onions and taking care of our tunnel crops while we waited for things to dry out.
This won’t have too big of an impact on timing and availability of potatoes this season. The potatoes will grow quickly now that it’s warm and we pre-sprouted them to help them get a little head start on growing before they went into the ground. We anticipate beginning to dig potatoes in mid-July starting with our red potatoes.