What You Should Know About Growing Potatoes

Potatoes make a great addition to any garden and farm. These starchy root vegetables come with lots of versatility, making them one of the most useful crops to grow. There are numerous ways to whip up a tasty snack with potatoes, from fries and baked potatoes to mash and homemade chips. You’ll love growing potatoes no matter what you do with your harvests. Whether you cook or sell them, getting the most out of your potatoes requires care, growth, and storage. Here is what you should know about growing potatoes.

Ideal Growing Conditions

For any fruit, vegetable, or plant, certain conditions maximize their growth and quality. Optimizing where your crops grow also offers multiple other benefits besides producing prized harvests. Potato dry matter plays an important role in potato production, and how you nurture your crops factors into it. The ideal growing environment for potatoes involves lots of sun exposure and acidic soil. As warm-bodied plants, these root veggies thrive in sunlight and warm temperatures, making spring and summer time the perfect planting season.

Proper Planting Practices

How you plant your potato seedlings further affects how your crops flourish. Keeping each planted sprout two feet apart gives your plants plenty of room to produce maximum yield. Adding mulch and fertilizer to your potato garden plots maintains the soil’s acidity and optimizes growing conditions. As a best practice, make sure to till the soil and loosen the top mixture before planting.

Getting Ready to Harvest

Ripe potatoes signal their maturity with brown and dead foliage. Most plants flower and bloom when they reach their peak stage of life. However, after sprouting and growing foliage, the next step of a potato’s development doesn’t look so pretty. A harvestable potato plant features brown, droopy, and dead-looking leaves. As a root plant, they only go through one cycle, meaning when they’re ready, they leave nothing behind. Once it’s time to uproot your crops, all you’ve got to do is dig the bulbs out.

What you should know about growing potatoes is that, like any harvestable plant, each stage of their life holds importance. From where to how you plant them, numerous factors affect the growth of your potato crops. Proper care, conditions, and farming practices ensure you produce quality goods suitable to sell, cook, and eat.