Hello, steemians, and welcome to my garden, eh!
I was out picking weeds yesterday in the potato patch and looking at the dismal state of the rows. It looked like most of the Yukon Gold potatoes that I planted in the first two rows didn't come up at all. I had planted these potatoes at the end of May, so they should have already been up. I made a post about planting theme here.
https://steemit.com/gardening/@amberyooper/tilling-and-planting-the-last-part-of-the-garden
I decided to replant the 2 rows using sprouty potatoes that I still had from last year's harvest. I was well underway when it occurred to me that I should take some pictures. Here's the potato section of the garden from the side where the potatoes didn't grow. The large potato plants are volunteers from potatoes that were left in the garden last year, probably having been missed during last fall's digging. You can see the sprouts sticking up from the dirt from the potatoes that I already had replanted before I took the pictures.
This picture is from the other side of the patch. The potatoes that are coming up in the 2 rows are Goldrush Russets that I decided to try this year. I planted these about a week after the Yukon Golds, and they're pretty much all up now.
These are the potatoes that I was using to replant the rows. They are leftover damaged or grub eaten Yukon Gold potatoes from last year's harvest that had gotten sprouty in the bucket after I cleaned out the storage room.
After I got all of the rows replanted, I hilled the potatoes that were already growing. Because of the long sprouts on the potatoes that I planted, I also hilled them up when I planted them.
I took this picture from the other end of the potato patch after I was done with hilling the potato plants. The fog you see in the upper part of the picture is smoke from my fire ring. I had started the fire to burn up some scrap wood and sit by it to watch the fire burn. A nice relaxing thing after all that bending over and crawling around on the ground.
As I was replanting those 2 rows, I kept finding the rotten remains of the seed potatoes that I had planted the first time. These were store bought certified seed potatoes, but for some reason, they just didn't grow. This is the first time that's happened to me. I may have left them out for too long after cutting them, or something, I really don't know. In the past, I've had really good luck with planting my sprouty potatoes, but they're not certified to be potato disease free, which is why I usually buy certified seed potatoes. It's a bit late to be planting potatoes in this area, but not so late that they won't have a decent harvest. It will just be a bit later into fall when they're ready to harvest, and that's fine with me.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by my page and checking out my post, eh!
As always, feel free to leave a comment or a question if you would like.
May the Steem Force be with you!
I hope your second planting does a nice harvest. My potatoes are doing fine so far but the ones that are in a sunny area are starting to turn yellow and die back. Maybe they need more water or something. I planted them in black felt bags pretty early this season.
Thanks!
Hello my friends @lightsplasher.!!
Wow wonderful blogin post
I love your amazing post
Thank you for the shiare
I have potatoes that pop up in random places in my garden. Apparently the person that lived at this house 5 years ago grew potatoes and they keep popping up. It's really awesome!
I need to get more familiar with growing potatoes.
Every garden I have had I have had potatoes, but the crops have been random and inconsistent. I know when to pick them, but I'd just like to get more consistent with them, so I find it interesting to hear other people's experience with them.
Blissful blessings and smilesin joyNathanNK
It's interesting that if you leave a few potatoes in the garden when you harvest, some of them come up the following year. I've gotten some pretty nice potatoes from those plants
It's a bit weird when you plant corn where you had potatoes the year before, and you have random potato plants in the corn patch. :-)
Sorry for the delay, @amberyooper, but here's your second comment upvote as a reward for the gardening journal challenge.
That's too bad the first ones didn't come up. Wonder what happened?
I planted a whole packet of beans this year at two different times (the second half the packet two weeks after the first) and only four came up between the two plantings. I wondered if they were improperly stored somewhere after being produced or something. It was also a variety I had not planted before.
Oh well. What do you do.
Yeah, some beans are like that it seems. I've had problems with germination with my beans a number of times. Last year was bad for that, I ended up with way less pole bean plants than I planted, a lot of them didn't come up. This year, I've had about a 70% germination rate on the various bean seeds. It seems like it's either too wet or too dry...