How I grow potatoes in south georgia

I srtart working the ground about a month before i plan to plant. By working I mean tilling or plowing. I plow now that I have a farm tractor. When I am ready to plant I purchase certified seed potatoes from the seed dealers. I only grow the red new potatoes because the white ones do not do well for me. If the potatoe is large i cut them into pieces leaving at least 2 ounces of flesh and two goo eyes. If you have tocut the seed potatoes they must sit out in the air and cure for at least 24 hours befor planting. I usually have them stacked in plant trays all over my kitchen floor.
Now for the planting. I till my rows with my tiller. let it work the soil good and it will make a deep trench. then I add lime to the trench and some compost. I fretill that in and then I lay the sdeed potatoes in the trench about 1 foot apart. i gently push them down and the kids come behind me covering them up so they are covered up about 6 to 8 inches deep.
Then you wait. sometimes it takes them 3 to 4 weeks to sprout. as they grow you hill the dirt up around the plant at least two times. If you have a late frost you must cover the plants with something for protection.
every morning i walk the potatoe patch and remove the potatoe beetles by hand. I put some liquid seven in a quart jar half full of water and drop them into it as i pick them off.
Sometimes i get a bad infestation of flea beetles. when this happens i spray with an organic pesticide.
once the potatoes bloom and the bloom die back you can start harvesting some by carefully digging down around the plant and removing the ;arger ones being careful not to damage the roots and always recover with soil. once the plants die back they are ready to harvest.
this is when the work really starts. I usually pl;ant a 50 llb bag of seed potatoe and harvest about 300 pounds of potaotes from it.
Now that we have the farm tactor we take one of the bottom plows and run it by the plants turning the potatoes over to expose them. then we all pitch in and gather them.

What kind of tractor do you have? I want to especially thank you for the tips on planting. I didn't know the part about curing them!

Good tips there Jcf. KJO, "curing" them is called "chitting", and it's a good thing (sorry martha). Not only does it allow the cut parts to heal over but helps in keeping down "blackmush" (local term for bacterial decay) and really cuts down on attracting wireworms.
To add to JCF's words, it really helps to add some form of potassium to the soil...you'll really make taters then! I love growing potatoes. We usually put in at least 300 feet of them, and often times more! I plant some early, then some more a month or so later. To me it is just a great crop to grow, easy to plant, easy to care for, and yields a wonderful crop! For yrs I dug them up by hand, no fun after doing a 100 ft row tho! Several yrs ago I went back to owning a tractor and now dig them with a "middle buster", similar to a plow (as JCF does) but instead of throwing them to the side it scoops under them and picks them up and to the surface.
Potatoes! Healthy food, wholesome, and beautiful in the garden! Also, even if you have some that are a bit bruised or unsightly they are still of great benefit. It's a great kindness to boil them up during a cold winters day and offer them to your chickens (also your rabbits if you raise them, they love em!) When they're cool give them to your animals just b4 dark...it'll give them some good warmth to get them thru the nite and also help keep egg production up. (I've even put a stack of them in the microwave for the animals instead of boiling them.)
By the way, there was a "humorous" thread on growing taters sometime back here at DG...perhaps a search will turn it up.
Thanks JCF, perhaps this will get people to become "potato heads" eh?

I love growing taters too, I plant mainly maincrop though which I don't plant until the end of April here. You're right Shoe, chitting is very important for maincrop and useful for earlies, something that is often forgotten by new growers. Buying seed potatoes from a reputable source is important because the crop should be disease free from the start. They are pretty heavy on water in take when the tuber formation starts in June if you do grow maincrop.

For such a small imput you get a large output, take care to harvest them all out though because you'll have volunteers growing for some years.

Have a look at the plant database, taters are there too.

kathyjo we have a ford 8N, around a 50 something model. old but still going just like me. lol. We bought it around 2 yrs ago and now I would not be without it. When we got it we got the harrows, plows, bush hog, scraper blade, and boom with it. also some planter that i have not learned to use yet. we got the hole package deal for $5,000. We have yet had to do anything to it but change the oil. It does not smoke or use oil at all so we felt like we got a good deal.

Taters are the second largest crop in Maine ... first is wild blueberries. In Aroostook county the kids have 3 weeks of school vacation to help harvest the taters. I wonder if the kids in Idaho get tater vacations?

When I was a kid living in north central Washington state school was let out for potato harvest and apple harvest. The area was mostly agricultural, many kids got up and did 2 hours of milking, chicken feeding, etc before comming to school. Then after school it was another round of chores before supper and schoolwork till bedtime. During the summer kids helped with putting up hay, and our neighbor kids had 200 ft long rows of potatoes and beans that had to be hoed and irrigated before they could go play. I grow 3 kinds of potatoes, russets, red, and yukon gold. I do everything by hand except I have a furrow attatchment that I use to make a row. I should use that to hill them up as well. They are dug by hand and stored in boxes in my basement where it is about 50 degrees. A cooler temperature would be better but that is the best I can do. The red ones start to sprout first so we eat them first, then the russets, and then the yellow ones. I have pretty neutral soil so I don't add any lime and I have heard that potatoes like slightly acid soil. My potatoes get planted in a different patch every year, there is very little problem with bugs or worms. Usually I follow the corn with spuds, I fertilize the corn with horse manure and then the pototoes get whatever is left the following year. Potatoes don't like fresh manure but they do like some compost which I add before hilling them. I get a good crop, 2 contractor size wheelbarrow loads from about 50 plants. Sometimes I start with new seed potatoes, sometimes plant my sprouting ones.

Wow, quite a good garden you have Mary! (You're right, taters do much better if the soil is a bit acidic.) I try to follow heavy feeders w/taters also. And usually after I dig the taters I have time to put in row of beans where the potatoes were to start putting back some N. October beans are a good choice (a.k.a. French Horticultural Beans) but any early maturing variety works just fine.
And of course, don't forget you can plant your spuds under leaves/straw if you like. I never have that much available but have done it a time or two. It is very easy to reach into the leaves and pick some good early taters w/out disturbing the whole plant.
JCF, that tractor will probably outlast ya'll...you got an excellent deal there! Such a pleasure just to listen to an 8N run, ain't it?

JCF, I got an 8N as well, but mine needs to have an overhaul. I got harrows, plow, blade, and brush hog.
I haven't tried raising red taters. They are always the kind we used for mashed potatoes though.

When I told my daughters that I was going to take their kids out of school for lambing season they just bout had a stroke. My brother who lives next to me home schools his kids so they make their own schedule. They will be home for lambing season.

Rotating potatoes to new areas is necessary because of the fungus that grows in the soil, right?

Hey, Shoe,

Re: following spuds with beans. There is an heirloom variety called Potato Patch that was used for just that purpose. After the early taters were dug these beans were immediately planted in the freshly turned soil.

My seed for these came from a NC family that's been growing them _at least_ since the late 1800s. But they've been in that part of the world since the 1600s, so who knows how long they've really been raising them.

The seed is white. Looks like a small cornfield bean.

Great! I remember you saying something once about those! Would you have a source for them? (Are they snap beans?) I'll run a search and see what I can come up with.
Many thanks!

Only source I had was the man in NC who sent them. I knew his daughter, who used to work at the local paper. She arranged the seeds for me, along with those of the Little White Cukes which the family has also grown forever.

I only have the one packet of beans. Maybe I should plant them this year, so we can be sure of continuing this variety.

Yes, they are a snap bean.

Little White Cukes? They wouldn't be from German ancestory would they? Did you get them from some folks in Forsyth County? The reason I ask is I used to have some seed stock from that area that dated back at least 5-7 generations in that family. (That county was settled by Moravians who moved there from what is now Pennsylvania...the Moravians were of German descent).
Well, whatever, if you have room, I'd plant them if you've been storing them awhile.

All good questions, Shoe. And the answer is; I dunno.

The name could be Germanic---Havnaer. They're currently from Conover, but have moved around a bit in that part of the world. I don't know the county.

They've been growing the Little Whites at least since the later 1800s. However, they've been in that area since the late 1600s, and were part of that VA/NC horticultural swapping group that included Tom Jefferson. Jefferson grew these in the early part of the century, and it's possible that the Havnaer's got the seed from him, or from one of his correspondents.

Re: Moravians. They settled parts of the NC wilderness as missionaries, and are a great source of information about daily life, foodways, seeds & crops, etc. etc. They wrote _everything_ down, in nitty-gritty detail. Stuff like, "Brother Etham made red pots (ceramic)today. Produced only 27 due to a malfunction of the kiln." Unfortunately, most of their stuff has not been translated, but the few journals etc. that have been are a real treasure trove of info.

Great info...I'll have to check into them more! If I can find my white cuke source I'll try to get some more stock from them and get more history. Thanks for the info.