Farm Planting fall potatoes

[Martinhouse]

I remember Summerthyme posting somewhere that potatoes need several months to "cure" before they will sprout, so that the ones harvested from a spring planting will not grow properly if planted for a fall crop the same year.

Well, I dug my Red Pontiacs in August this year, (summer was about a month late in my part of Arkansas) but a lot of the potatoes are already sprouting.

Can anyone tell me, if I pot some of these potatoes and grow them in my greenhouse over the winter, will that help me "force" them to change their cycle enough that I will have developed a crop that will thereafter be suitable for fall planting?

Thanks for any thoughts or advice,

Carol

 

[summerthyme]

I honestly don't know. Most potatoes have a 4 month (give or take) "dormant period" after maturing where they won't sprout no matter what you do/what conditions they are kept in. This keeps them from sprouting in September, say, from an early crop that matured in August and was left in the ground, because in the north, they wouldn't survive the first frost, and the seed potato wouldn't have enough stored energy left to sprout again in the spring.

All I can do is tell you what I do when I run into something that "breaks the rules"... or when I WANT to break the rules. Try it. I'm a little confused, though... are you trying to grow potatoes NOW that will mature this year yet? Do you have that long of a frost free season that that is feasible?

If you want fall planting for them to start early in the spring, you want potatoes that are fully dormant. Every year, we get a few huge, healthy potato plants from tubers that we missed while digging. I've learned that I need to yank them out, though, as they are the primary reservoir for blight, which is a problem here. I hate doing it, and if the season is staying quite dry, and I have moved my primary potato patch to a new spot which isn't downwind of the old one, I often leave a few for the earliest new potatoes.

But no matter when you plant them, potatoes (like any other tender plant) have a minimum requirement of frost free (and warmish) days with a certain number of hours of sunlight for them to produce.

Summerthyme

 

[Martinhouse]

Since these potatoes are sprouting now, just two months after I dug them, I'd like to grow them in some pots in my greenhouse. I expect they would grow fairly slowly and hopefully not be ready to harvest until well into spring.

This way, they'd then have their four months to cure and then hopefully sprout in time for a fall crop planted outdoors as would be normal for a fall crop. This whole thing would be separate from the usual spring planting I do with the seed potatoes I get at the feed store in February or March.

I just thought it would be nice to be able to grow two smaller crops of potatoes each year. This would give me more room in the garden for other things and also make it easier to rotate things. Not to mention how nice it would be to have fresh potatoes more of the year.

What I'm trying to do here is develop another line of potatoes that are geared for fall planting rather than spring planting, since you've said the same line can't be planted twice in the same year.

As you said, I should just go ahead and try. My greenhouse isn't heated, but I could probably bring the potted potatoes in on nights I know it will freeze out there. Maybe I'll build another little rolling cart and make it high enough to catch every single ray of sun that comes into the greenhouse all winter.

Thanks very much, my thinking cap must have one of those litle propellers on it cuz I think I can hear it spinning really fast right now. Already getting some ideas.

Carol

 

[Martinhouse]

I probably didn't explain myself well enough in these previous posts.

Where I live, we can grow two crops of potatoes. But the feed stores don't sell seed potatoes for fall planting. And you have explained that what I dig from the spring planting. When I saw that my spring planted potatoes were already sprouting, I wondered if I could plant them right away and produce a few potatoes over the entire winter that would then become my potatoes especially for fall planting. These would be kept entirely separate from the ones I can buy in the spring. It would be only this year that I would be growing them in the greenhouse, since it's too late to grow them outside.

(It's supposed to get down to 28 here tonight and I suspect it will be a good deal colder than that out in the country where I live. It's always nearly five degrees warmer in town)

Carol