Fungal spores can survive on any plant debris in the soil, so I'd keep a careful eye on the potato plants after they sprout and be ready to spray the plants at the very first sign of fungal disease.

I have had mixed results with fall potatoes. Mine never have produced yields remotely close to what I get from spring potatoes. Fresh potatoes are wonderful, though, so I think that if you have the space, they are worth growing.

Because seed potatoes that have been cut into pieces tend to rot in hot soil before they can sprout, I'd plant only whole seed potatoes. That likely will help you get a good stand. Planting deep will help, but it also means the plants will take longer to emerge from the ground and grow, unless you plant them in trenches and fill in the trenches as they grow. You probably could help the seed potatoes sprout more quickly and get off to a good start by temporarily shading the ground after you plant the seed potatoes. Long before I discovered and bought floating row cover or shade cloth, I used to shade fall beds just by putting a lawn chair at each corner of the bed and tying an old sheet to each chair so it could shade the ground until the plants began emerging.

I've never really had pest issues with fall potatoes, and I consider that another good reason to grow a fall crop.

Finally, harvest your fall potatoes before the soil temperature falls below 50 degrees. Potatoes harvested from soil temperatures below 50 degrees are more prone to bruise from being handled, and thus, they will not store as well.

OSU has a good idea in one of their PDFs. It says to plant into a trench, cover with a couple inches of dirt, then put a few inches of straw on top to keep everything cool.

Thanks to both of you. I'm torn between wanting to get them in the ground and wanting to let this weekend's super high temps pass before I plant them. Do you think that shredded oak leaves would be okay to help keep thme cool?

In spite of a great harvest, my tomato plants looked worse than they ever have by late july, so I actually thew out all my mulch hoping to be rid of as much fungus as possible. I will keep an eye on the potatoes for sure. Next year I might break down and spray the tomatoes with fungicide early. That just sounds like so much work!

You're welcome. I'd go ahead and plant them unless your ground is extremely wet. It is going to take them a while to sprout (unless you already have pre-sprouted them indoors) so I wouldn't want to delay planting them because, in the fall garden, you're always racing to get plants to grow and produce a harvest before the cold weather arrives and a delay of a few days can make the difference between getting a good harvest or not getting one.

Shredded oak leaves would work well as mulch.

With the mulch you threw out, you could have composted it on a hot pile and the heat would have destroyed the disease microorganisms. So, I hope you didn't totally throw it away since it could break down into nice compost over the autumn/winter.

Spraying with a fungicide from day one that the plants go into the ground is the best way to prevent fungal infections, and it is a lot of work. I sprayed my plants twice this spring, but with rain falling almost every day in May, I doubt it helped much. I often don't spray at all and just accept that my plants will decline a lot beginning in June or July, but this year I felt like I had to spray the fungicide or the plants wouldn't have made it to June. I do have a surprising number of plants still with some relatively healthy foliage and I'm still harvesting more tomatoes than we can eat, but overall the tomato plants look horrible. I probably would have yanked out most of them already, but it has been too hot to do much more than harvest and mow.....and water a couple of times a week.

They would be baked potatoes here.

If you can keep them from getting to hot they should be OK. I'm afraid they will rot if they get too warm in this heat and damp ground.