Jenny, Potatoes take a while to emerge. How long they take is highly variable depending on the variety you planted, the soil temperatures where they're being grown, etc. as well as the air temperatures. Potatoes planted in cold ground in February or early March are much slower to emerge than potatoes planted in mid to late-March in warmer conditions. Also, it depends on whether the eyes had sprouted a little (or a lot) before you planted them, and it depends on how deeply they are planted. Still, from a planting on March 3rd, if the seed potatoes had eyes when they were planted and they are planted only a few inches deep, you should have something starting to sprout and show. Maybe the cold weather has slowed them down some. I don't remember exactly when I planted potatoes, but at least some of them were planted that long ago. I planted them about 8" deep and some of them have foliage that has emerged up above the ground now, though not all of them have emerged yet. I plant mine in raised beds above grade level and raised beds warm up a little more quickly than grade-level soil.

I am assuming you planted certified seed potatoes and not grocery store potatoes. If you planted grocery store potatoes, then it is anyone's guess when they'll sprout and when growth will emerge. When you use grocery store potatoes as seed potatoes, it is best to purchase organic potatoes because they will not have been sprayed with anti-sprouting chemicals like conventional grocery store potatoes will be. However, eventually grocery store potatoes will sprout.....after the anti-sprouting agents wear off.

As far the little mounds of soil.....that's a bad sign.Could be moles, gophers or voles. If you lived here in southern OK, I'd add that they could be fire ants, but I don't know if the fire ants have made it to your part of OK yet. Could be that the little creatures are eating your seed potatoes or already have eaten them. I'd definitely dig into the soil and see if the seed potatoes are still there. I wouldn't be surprised if they are totally gone and were devoured by the little beasts that left the mounds of soil. It can happen to anyone, even if you've never seen the rodents around before. They seem to have a special knack for finding root crops even in the first year of a new garden.

It is difficult to grow root crops in some parts of OK because of the large population of rodents that like to devour them. If you have gophers or voles, you're going to have your work cut out for you. Moles, by the way, eat insects, not plants.

Dawn

Lovely! (sarcasm)

Thanks Dawn. Yes they were certified seed potatoes, but I did buy them at the grocery store. They just said "red" and "white" on the boxes they were in. I bought them around mid Feb and let them sit on the counter until March 3rd when I planted them. They had plenty of eyes, I planted them in about 6" of soil. I will be looking in the cages tomorrow.

Any advice on how to get rid of the bastards doing the eating? I am so glad I planted carrots in a plastic storage container.

Jenny, Okay, then, with certified seed potatoes (when I use the term grocery store potatoes what I really mean is potatoes intended for eating and purchased from the produce section), you don't have an anti-sprouting chemical keeping them from sprouting. It could be the cold.....it could be they are growing fine and just haven't quite made it above the grade level of the soil yet, or it could be something is eating them.

After you check to see if you have potatoes left in the ground, we can talk about how to figure out which critter you have and what to do about it. It isn't necessarily easy to deal with rodents that are eating your garden plants. They are a recurring problem in many parts of our state though, so we do have a range of options available for dealing with them.

Dawn

I checked my sunchokes 2 days ago, something had eaten all of them, I just had tunnels and stumps where sunchokes use to be. I also notices a gopher mound near the north garden yesterday evening, set the trap and caught one in just a few hours.

I got some caster beans this morning and plan on trying to find some gopher purge plants. The caster bean seed are old and may not come up. I have tried both of these plants in the past and could not tell that they helped any, but I feel I must do something.

My potatoes still seem to be ok. The first planting has been coming up and getting frozen back. I have placed hay over them which seems to help. None of the later planted potatoes have come up.

Larry

Well I have 2 stubs of potatoes left in one tower and none in the others! I checked first thing this morning, but couldn't get back on here because I had to help DH build the rest of the chicken run.

I don't care to much since potatoes are cheap, but I really want to get rid of whatever tunneled up in there! The holes are about 4" across with about a small shovel full of dirt mounded up next to it.
What is so amazing is the top surface of my soil I planted the potatoes in was totally undisturbed! If I hadn't seen the red dirt mounds next to the towers, I would never have known it was a critter.

I would like to get rid of them, but don't want to use something that will pollute the soil or the well water. I'm trying to keep chemicals out of my veggie garden. At this point though as long as it isn't toxic to humans, I'll use it!

Any and all help appreciated.

Jen

The easiest and surest method for a single gopher is a trap. I use wooden box traps and they work well.

Larry, I could send you a couple more Jerusalem artichoke roots. I have enough. Also, there is a chance that the critter missed a few "nubbins" and that they will yet sprout. My Jerusalem artichokes have not yet broken the ground..

George

George, thank you, I would love to have a nubbin, but let's wait and see if the gopher missed any. I did find a small nubbin about 3/4"x1" that had a sprout on it. I took it over to my son's house and planted it, he has 4 cats and very few critters.

I will let you know If nothing comes up.

Thanks again, Larry

Larry, Gophers really love sunchokes. Some people plant sunchokes merely to lure the gophers away from the potatoes. I know if I did that they'd just eat the sunchokes first and then go eat the potatoes anyway.

I'd focus on using the castor oil or dropping castor beans in their holes and wouldn't waste my time planting a gopher purge plant. Studies, and anecdotal evidence as well, show that gophers do not leave because of the gopher purge plants and the plants often are very invasive.

This weather has been great for the potatoes....cool just the way they like it and actual rain falling from the sky. The ones I planted earliest are growing by leaps and bounds, but the ones I planted latest haven't broken through the soil yet. The ones I pointed right in the middle of that time frame are up just a couple of inches out of the soil. I'm always so happy when I see them emerge....just to know that nothing ate them and they didn't rot in cold, wet soil.
(I planted 35 lbs. of seed potatoes so that even if some of them didn't emerge, we'd still have plenty to harvest.)

Jen, If it is only a single gopher, I'd trap it like Scott suggested. Often, though, you have more than one. They can make a mound further away from the garden and sneak in underground. We don't have a big problem with them at our house because we have cats that control them pretty well, but our cats are inside at night (to protect the cats from the plentiful roaming wildlife) so the rodents active at night can last a while until they stay out too late early one morning and a cat finds them.

I don't know if you are in more of an urban or suburban setting or in a rural to semi-rural setting. If it is the latter, you may have meadow mice, aka voles. Voles are a big problem here at our house, although the cats control them about as well as it is possible to control them. It is just that the surrounding acres are full of them, so when the cats kill a few, more move it. It is a constant battle. We had moles in the beginning, but had a young male cat named Moose who wiped out all the moles, voles, gophers and field mice. The moles never came back, likely because we treated our yard for grubs using Milky Spore Powder, but the others try to come back constantly and our cats do a decent job of keeping them more or less under control.

You can use a mole and gopher repellent. I'll link one below to show you what they look like. These use castor oil. You can apply it as a granular product or a liquid one and water it into the ground. It coats the plants with a bad flavor the gophers don't like and that repels them. It isn't a poison., just a repellent. Castor beans themselves contain one of the deadliest poisons (ricin) known to mankind, but the castor oil does not contain it. In fact, castor oil is sometimes used in the manufacture of chocolate.....I say that to make the point that the castor oil repellent is not dangerous. Castor beans are. I grow them, but handle the beans carefully....never leaving any lying around, for example, where they could end up in a container of edible beans.

I grow castor bean plants as ornamentals, and have found that a row of them growing outside the fenced edible gardens keep the rodents away....but I don't have any small children here who might accidentally ingest a castor bean, and our cats don't chew on the plants. I don't grow any castor bean plants near the fenced dog yard since dogs like to chew on stuff, and our dogs are not allowed to roam outside the fenced dog yard unless they are with us and on a leash because we have too much dangerous wildlife roaming around.

I have had to use the repellents a couple of times, but only twice, I think, and we are in our 15th spring here. I did find gopher mounds out back in a sandy soil area where we are putting in a new garden this year (our original garden is mostly clay) and I am concerned I'll have trouble with them back there, but just will deal with it when and if it occurs.

One sure sign you have gophers is that you'll walk outside one day and there will be a gap where a plant once stood. This most commonly occurs right after you have set out transplants in the garden. Disappearing plants that are totally gone as if they'd never been there at all are a sign of gophers. For some reason, at our house they really like to eat periwinkle plants and lemon balm plants.

Just read and follow the label directions on the bottle of repellent if you choose to go that route. There also are poison pellets available at farm supply stores, but I garden as organically as I can and we have pets and wildlife so poison pellets are not something I'd ever use. The box traps I'm most familiar with have a name like Gopher-Getter, but there are other metal traps that some people use. You can find the mole and gopher repellents at any big box store like Wal-Mart, Lowe's or Home Depot. Here near our house, the rodents usually start popping up in February and all the stores sell out of the repellents, and then you have to wait for more to come in, but generally it is back in stock pretty quickly.

There are many brands of mole/gopher repellents that contain castor oil. The one I am linking is the one I usually see in the stores down here in southern OK or in western North Texas.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Example of a Mole/Gopher Repellent Product

I cut up 5 pounds of certified seed potatoes and put them in the work shop to dry prior to planting. The next morning they were all gone but no sign of any activity, nothing disturbed...just gone. What can eat 5 pounds of potatoe in one night?

Might you have pack rats? They're smaller than squirrels and nocturnal. I once put out several pounds of rat poison, only to have every bit of it disappear. Kept seeing "rats" too. Then, one day when I was organizing the shed, I found all that rat poison in one of their nests.

I should mention that they were up on a counter in a tray, not on the floor. The tray was not moved and not a scrap was left. It was like they just vanished. Door to the work shop was hooked shut.

Anything on the trail cam?