gourmet potatoes

Three Easy Methods for Growing Gourmet Potatoes

Dan Fruits & Vegetables, This Land of Ours

How to grow gourmet potatoes. That’s coming up on This Land of Ours.

gourmet potatoes
The potato is the vegetable of choice in the United States. On average, Americans devour about 142 pounds of it per year. New potato releases by ARS scientists give us even more choices of potatoes to eat.
Photo by Scott Bauer

There are literally thousands of varieties of potatoes, some the size of a foot and others barely bigger than your pinky finger. They can be purple, blue, yellow, red, or white; inside, out, or inside and out. They can have a fluffy texture or creamy or waxy.

Three easy methods for growing potatoes at home are:

  • Conventional hilling – digging a deep trench and planting seeds about a foot down beside the excavated soil.
  • Container gardening – in which three or four seed potatoes are started in a large plant pot or five-gallon bucket filled about a quarter of the way with soil or mulch.
  • Mulch beds – a no-dig method where potatoes are placed in loosened soil and then covered with about a foot of organic mulch.

Potatoes should be planted in early spring, a couple of weeks before the last frost date. The crop will be ready within three or four months.

Listen to Cathy Isom’s This Land of Ours program here.

Three Easy Methods for Growing Gourmet Potatoes