We want to get our potatoes out of the ground soon. We don't want them to spend much time in hot (>85°F) soil. We have noticed that many more tend to degrade when in hot soil.

Dawn,

I just read an interesting article from TA&M. The author writes that air temperature >90°F has a negative impact on yield too. The impact relates to heat affecting the plant above the ground.

Johnny

Another thing just occurred to me. We mound (hill) out potatoes at least twice while they are growing (but not after they flower). That will cause the soil, near the potatoes, to be even warmer. See attached pic...

One of the hall marks of raised rows is warmer soil due to more direct exposure to the Sun and less influence (cooling or heat sink affect) of the surrounding soil.

Johnny, I would like to dig my potatoes tomorrow. Or today. Or yesterday. Unfortunately we received a tremendous amount of rainfall over the last week (almost 6" at our house and that was on top of rain the previous week too), so I'll try to be patient and wait for the soil to dry up some. Patience is not my strong suit.

I don't hill. I plant deeply in raised beds, but I think the potatoes probably get just as hot as those planted at grade level and hilled. I mulch heavily. I have two beds positioned so they are in the shade beginning around 2 pm by early June and the third is in the shade by about 3 or 3:15 pm. Does any of this help them stay cooler? Maybe, maybe not. Sometimes all that you can do just isn't enough if the weather is warming up too much before you can dig them. We all just do the best we can with what we've got on any given day.

Someone with a small potato plot even could erect shade cloth (even bed sheets would work) over their potato patch right now and probably keep their crop a bit cooler. Those of us with larger gardens would need a whole lot of shade cloth! So, we cross our fingers and hope.

I'm worried that with all this rain, the potato bed may start making potato soup without me and not in a good way, either. Back in 2012 I just couldn't dig quickly enough even though I dug every day, so some of my potatoes rotted in the heat, and some of them got those raised up lenticels. Part of the problem was that the soil really was hard and compacted from the drought of 2011, and part of it was that I planted far too many potatoes. It seems like our harvest that year was around 400 lbs. That's too many for just 2 people. So, I plant a lot less now and get the harvesting done more quickly, and have done everything I can to make the soil loose and rich and fluffy in those raised beds. That's about all I can do.

We are short of rain so often here that I hate to complain about getting 6" of rain as we head into the summer heat, so I'll complain that the gardener who maintains my garden knew heavy rain was a possibility and she failed to dig the potatoes ahead of the heavy rainstorms. I may have to fire her. Well, maybe not. She did get all the mature onions, cucumbers, cabbages, beans, lettuce, strawberries and plums harvested before the rain, but just couldn't get to the potatoes too. A person can only do so much in the available time.

Yes, the heat has long been an enemy of potato growing here. I have tried as hard as possible for as many years as I remember to plant potatoes ridiculously early to beat the heat. I even plant them earlier here most years than I planted them when we lived in Texas 80 miles south of our home in Oklahoma. I learned long ago to focus more on getting them out of the ground before it got too hot than to even think about leaving them in the ground a bit longer to size up some more. Leaving them in the ground a bit longer for any reason hasn't worked out for me here, though sometimes the need for the skin to toughen up has led me to leave them in the ground a week longer than I'd like.

I ran out to the garden and looked at it briefly this evening after spending much of the day playing hooky away from home and away from the garden. I discovered that I have onions, pole beans, tomatoes, and cucumbers to harvest tomorrow. I'd like to add potatoes to that list, but the ground is awfully wet. However, the standing water in the garden paths that was several inches deep has all soaked into the ground now, so we're making progress. I noticed a bunch of leafhoppers have arrived much later than usual and I just laughed at them. Often they give my potato plants hopper burn, but they cannot do much of that this year because my potatoes really are done, done and done. If they weren't quite done before the rainfall, they are done now. I hope the hoppers move on somewhere else now. All the remaining lettuce is bolting, so tomorrow the chickens can have a big lettuce party. After high temperatures in the 70s (even the low 70s) on all those rainy days last week, this week's temperatures are going to be shocking to the garden plants, and perhaps to the gardener as well.

Dawn

Dawn,

If it was easy, you'd get bored.

Some of what I wrote about potatoes was just general information for Oklahoma. I have read many, many articles on the internet that would lead to complete failure if followed here.

I am already making contact with different folks in Gulfport MS about community gardens. I have a whole lot of learning to do in the next few years.

Johnny

Well apparently my wife has a houzz account as well! I didn't even realize she was logged in when I posted this question yesterday.

Anyways, I planted Yukon Gold and Red Pontiac the last week of February. I'm pretty certain they don't have a disease, they're just starting to die like normal. I dug up one of each last night, the red had 2 3/4 lb while the gold had 2 lb. I was surprised as the Pontiac always seem to produce much more than the Gold. The Pontiacs do much better in clay I think.

I have always worried about potatoes getting to hot by leaving them in the ground too long. We have our first market this coming Saturday, so I'll wait till Friday to dig up enough for that and see how it goes the following week. Looks like it's going to heat up this weekend and be summer.

Johnny, That is true.

I agree that if a person here tries to go by what they read about growing potatoes on the internet, they'll find much of that stuff was written by people who have a regular summer climate, not an almost-hotter-than-you-know-where Oklahoma style climate. Growing potatoes here is so different from growing them in, let's say, Pennsylvania or Montana or Idaho. Sadly. I wish we could grow them all summer long and leave them in the ground for storage, etc. etc. etc. That would be awesome. Instead, we find ourselves pushing like mad just to harvest them on time. The frustrating thing is that if we leave our potatoes in the ground on purpose, they generally rot in July if not sooner, but if we miss one here and there, it will survive and give us volunteer potatoes next year or the one after that. I had a potato plant pop up this year in a bed where I haven't grown potatoes in three or four years.

Houston has a wonderful community garden that has turned into a community. If I can think of its name I'll try to find online info about it and link it here. They started out trying to feed those folks who have food insecurity (including the homeless) and it has grown into something far beyond that---including building inexpensive housing to house the homeless. Isn't it amazing how great things come from tiny seeds?

OSUEngineer, No,no, no. Make the summer weather go away and stay away. We don't want it. The weather is about perfect right now. I am perfectly happy to wake up to an overnight low of 60 degrees and don't want for it to change.

I don't know how long I will leave the potatoes in the ground, and with all the recent rainfall, mine might be swimming underneath the service of the soil, so I cannot afford to leave them for long....and I don't want to dig them while wet. It is quite a dilemma.

I am going to gently dig around one that died back a couple of weeks ago and see what I find.

Red Pontiac does seem to thrive in clay. They always do well for me, even when I planted them in barely-amended clay in our earliest years here. Another odd thing I've noticed, and maybe it is just an odd coincidence, was that when the voles showed up here a few years back, they ate the white and gold fleshed tomatoes that had brown skin and didn't touch the red or blue skinned ones. I don't know why.

Dawn

Dawn,

There is no accounting for taste.(;-)

That made me laugh!

My wife discovered a spot on one of the potatoes I dug up. Looks like a grub or something was eating on it. Since we had these same problems last fall with our sweet potatoes, I decided do go ahead and dig all of them up. I filled up about 2 1/2 five gallon buckets and still have 10 plants out of 45 left to dig. Based on that, I'd say it's really not worth it to wait so the potatoes can get bigger. This year and last year I top dressed when the plants were flowering, and I can tell a difference from former years.

osuenginer,

When we have a lot of damaged potatoes, we blanch and freeze them or pressure can them, usually both. We allow the nicest ones to dry in the shade of a tree before bagging them. With our wind and heat, it only takes about an hour for them to dry in the shade.

Johnny

OSUenginner, Did you find any grubs while digging? I would think if they'd been there eating the taters, they might still be around. I found one grub while digging raised bed #1 and a couple of wire worms, but haven't found any damaged potatoes yet.

Johnny, At the rate it is warming up now, by the weekend it might take them only 20 minutes in the shade to dry.

Dawn

osuenginer,,

Have you considered letting your chickens scratch around in your garden all Winter? I think they would enjoy helping you.

Johnny

I don't have any chickens, nor do I really want to get any. I did find a few grubs, but not any damage. I'm not sure what happened because I never had them until last fall. I will keep rotating where I grow the potatoes. Most of the damage to the potatoes was inflicted by me with the spading fork.

Overall I got about 54 lbs of Red Pontiac and 20 lbs of Yukon Gold. I think I planted around 15 lbs or seed potatoes. Really I need more room, but I have so many lateral lines and I don't think my wife would appreciate tilling up the front yard. How do you like my home made crates?

We didn't have chickens in town, but we have them in the country. I love them, but we have lots of room for them here. I don't know how much of a backyard, if any, I'd be willing to give up to them if we lived in a city and had limited space. Their favorite thing in the winter or earliest spring is to dig through the garden soil eating every bug they find. Today as I worked inside the garden, they loitered just outside the garden fence, digging, scratching and making happy chicken sounds. Their company is enjoyable, and I hope they are busy eating ticks, grasshoppers and other pests.

Today I dug half of another raised bed of potatoes and found 1 grub just like in the other bed. Apparently we have a limit here of about 1 grub per bed or half-bed. They usually aren't in the potato beds, but every year is different from the one before, so perhaps the grubs are what we get to make up for not having Colorado Potatoe Beetles this year.

Your potato crates look great and you have a wonderful harvest.

Gardeners always want and need more room to grow stuff. I always did until we moved here, and now I have all the space I want, but it is hard to maintain a lot of land and a large garden, so I could even kinda, sorta argue that smaller (or at least smaller than what we have) is better. Or at least smaller is easier to maintain.

osuengineer,

I like your crates.

We have been getting a return of about six pounds per pound planted. What was your return this year? What is it usually?

Johnny

Dawn,

Same question.???

Johnny, I don't keep track of it that way. I'm not all scientifically oriented like you guys are. I don't weigh them. I don't remember how many pounds of seed potatoes I planted. I'm just happy when I get to start digging potatoes, and even happier when I finish because I always find myself digging in hot weather.

My criteria is "did we harvest enough to eat?" and if the answer is yes, we had a good year. If the answer is "How are we ever going to eat all those potatoes?" we had a great year. If the answer is that I look at the piles of potatoes and want to cry when I think of all the potato peeling I'll be doing, then we had an awesome year. This year? We had an awesome year and I am promising myself I won't plant so many next year (and I always say that, and always plant too many the next year anyway).

My favorite part of digging potatoes isn't even about the potatoes. It is about looking at all the newly available space that has opened up and now is ready for a succession planting of something else.

I'm so swamped with processing the harvest of so many different veggies right now that I probably won't even get to do the succession planting for another week, but at least whenever I get a chance to plant, those raised beds will be ready and waiting.

Dawn

Nice crates, osuengineer!

Excellent haul, dude! Sorry to read about the damage. Might be mealworms in your garden. Rotate and skip a year, if you can. If all else fails you can make money shipping mealworms to pet owners.

Chickens think mealworms are candy.

I wouldn't want to encourage mealworms even if I could make money selling them. It would be hard for a mealworm operation to exist near a garden without the mealworms just devastating the garden. Our chickens do like mealworms, but they don't like Eastern tent caterpillars. You'd think chickens wouldn't be very picky, but sometimes they are.

Well, our potato harvest sucks. I wanted to get the blighty plants away from the garden, so we pulled them sooner than necessary. Some of the seed potatoes had not even deteriorated and made no tubers at all. This was a new bed and it probably needs some ammendments. We'll get a couple of meals, but no canning these.

Amy,

Come on down to Coyle Oklahoma tomorrow. You will have all the Irish potatoes you can pick up. We still have about 4,000 pounds to harvest.

https://www.facebook.com/visionfarms

Johnny

I hope y'all have lots of help tomorrow. I'd love to come join y'all but we're got a family thing going on tomorrow.

Thanks Johnny, if you were closer I would be there. Good luck with it!