Potatoes Ideas, Tips & Guides

Flea beetles are tiny pests that feed on a variety of garden plants. “Flea beetles can cause a lot of damage on edible and ornamental plants,” says Alejandro Del-Pozo, PhD, assistant professor and extension specialist atVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “If you have an infestation and do nothing, they’ll become a problem because they’re prolific and resilient.”

Shake Shack

There's perhaps no vegetable more humble than the potato. This starchy spud grows quietly underground but, once you've dug up your harvest, you're treated to everything from sides dishes like perfectly crisp homemade french fries to scalloped potatoes to recipes from breakfast to dinner. Potatoes are the versatile workhorse of the kitchen and, depending on the variety you plant, your harvest season could last several months.

Wireworms are the soil-dwelling larvae of the click beetle, and live predominantly in undisturbed grassland. In gardens they can sometimes cause problems by eating the roots of seedlings and older plants, as well as burrowing into root vegetables. There’s around 60 species of click beetle in the UK and only a handful of their larvae cause problems, yet all of them are a source of food source for creatures such as birds and small mammals. In general, wireworms may only be a problem in ground that has been converted from lawn or grassland into a vegetable plot, particularly when root vegetables such as potatoes are grown.

Growing sweet potatoes in sacks and bags is a super easy and successful way to bring homegrown goodness to your table. From saving space to getting bigger tubers, this method is about to become your new favorite gardening trick. Let’s dig in!

Bobby Flay has said that his last meal would be a cheeseburger (“with two slices of American cheese”). And the “most signature dish that I have” is the shrimp and roasted garlic tamale that’s become a staple on the menu at all of his Mesa Grill restaurants. He also revealed to our pals at Allrecipes that chicken “is sort of ‘my protein.’”

Summer is arriving and, all of a sudden, the kitchen garden is coming into its own. I am harvesting masses of salad leaves, broad beans and strawberries, and hopefully the first new potatoes. I can almost see things growing before my eyes, including the weeds, which I make an effort to keep on top of every few days (although I leave self-seeded dark pink poppies and some mauve linaria to encourage insects and add colour). To make the most of a small space, I grow salad leaves in large galvanised metal troughs, making sure that I sow a new crop every few weeks so I have a constant supply through the summer. Salad leaf mixes, including swift-growing, cut-and-come-again lettuce, rocket and mustard leaves, are available from almost any seed company, or at garden centres. Winter salad leaves, including mizuna, are best sown after midsummer, as they tend to run to seed quickly. I grow my salad leaves in the least time-consuming way, scattering the seeds thinly on the surface of the prepared soil or compost, and raking them in gently with a hand rake. Keep them watered and they will germinate within a few days and be ready to harvest in about six weeks. If you want to grow them in your vegetable beds, it is better to sow them in drills, so that the emerging seedlings are easily distinguishable from the weeds.

Carson Downing

Right plant, right place, as Roy Lancaster’s book taught us, is a well-known adage and one we all try to live by. Get it right and your garden will love you for it. On closer inspection that phrase belies a whole historical context that is not evident at first sight. I was reminded recently of the stark fact that most of the plants we have in our gardens are from somewhere else. From Asia, the Antipodes, South Africa, to the Americas and continental Europe, these continents have supplied us for centuries with plants that fill our green spaces. Many are now so familiar and yet two hundred plus years ago they arrived as exotic specimens, delighting the Victorians and their predecessors.

While many plants love company, this is not true for all. There are vegetables you should plant separately to prevent competition for nutrients and reduce the chances of pests, disease, loss of flavor, or stunted growth.

What makes red root vegetables a must have on your platter is their nutrient composition! Being rich in beta-carotene, several vitamins, magnesium, phosphorus, folate, calcium and antioxidants, they offer plenty of healthy benefits that you just can’t ignore!

On 5 November 1995, Space Shuttle Columbia landed after nearly 16 days in orbit. During its mission, five tiny potato tubers grew from leaf cuttings on board. This technique is used on Earth to grow virus-free seed potatoes. Tests later showed that there were no significant differences between the space-flown tubers and ones grown on Earth.

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If you’re like me as soon as you plant your seed potatoes you’re already anticipating the harvest of tender tubers. However, potatoes are a long season crop and you’ll have to practice patience. So how long does it take for potatoes to grow? Generally the potato growing season is three to four months, but there are a few strategies you can do to encourage an early harvest. In this article you’ll learn about the different types of potatoes, which ones grow the fastest, and discover six ways to speed up the homegrown harvest. Types of potatoes Potatoes are categorized according to the length of their growing season. To ensure the longest season of homeg

Sarah Martens

These underground fruits are unique because they develop beneath the soil’s surface, often due to specialized adaptations by the plants that produce them.

Here in the Northeast, rocks are just a part of gardening life, and even if you are raising vegetables in an old garden (one that’s been well tended for decades), there will still be some rocks in the soil. You (as well as the tines on your pitchfork) can’t help but encounter them. However, there are still plenty of vegetables that you can grow well in these conditions. Here are some of them.

As summer approaches and we’re faced with another season of determining what's for dinner, we're sharing a glimpse at how BHG readers gather for a meal. Welcome to our new series, Dinner Diaries, where we're asking readers to anonymously share how they get dinner on the table including grocery shopping, budgeting, cooking, and their favorite family recipes. Here, a family of three in Georgia works together to get dinner on the table. Read on to see how they shop, prep, and cook to get dinner, and weekend breakfasts, on the table.

How to Grow Potatoes in Straw

Potatoes are among the most productive vegetables for home gardens, and knowing how to plant seed potatoes properly ensures your success. For every pound of seed potatoes you plant, expect to harvest three to five pounds of spuds in return. That’s a great investment! Plus, with the long storage life of potatoes and the myriad of ways you can prepare them, they are a must-grow crop for many gardeners. And, to sweeten the deal even more, potatoes are a simple crop for beginner gardeners to grow. In this article, we’ll look at what seed potatoes are, how to plant seed potatoes, and how to grow them successfully—no matter how much, or how little, space you have to grow. What are seed potatoes? Seed potatoes are not actually seeds at all. Instead, they are small potato tubers that are used for plan

If you are roaming in the wilderness of Tennessee and come across mushrooms that look too tasty, well, wait! They can be poisonous! Let’s have a look at them.

Overwatering is one of the biggest issues that can result in a demise of any plant. To ensure your green friends are safe from it – here are some home items for your rescue!

From earthy new potatoes and bite-sized salad varieties, to floury bakers and roasters, the humble potato remains the nation’s favourite vegetable. If you’re a potato aficionado, there’s a huge number of exciting potato varieties you can grow that you’ll never see in the shops. You don’t even need a garden to grow them – many grow very happily in large bags or pots on a balcony or patio.

This is a purposeful moment in the vegetable garden. Spring is in the air and I’m gearing up for the busiest time of year. You can start sowing hardy crops such as broad beans, chard, beetroot, lettuce and carrots. But the weather and soil can still be cold in March, so only sow seeds outdoors if you are feeling confident it is warm enough. Alternatively – and, I think, preferably – you can start sowing these crops under cover, either germinating them indoors and growing them on in a cold frame, or in a greenhouse. Sowing seeds in trays and modules gives you more control, as you can plant them out as seedlings rather than taking the risk of leaving them to germinate in the ground. A compromise is to sow seeds in raised troughs, where the soil will be warmer and you can cover them with cloches or panes of glass to protect them further. However, onion sets and garlic can be planted straight out in the garden now.

They say that you can tell a surprising amount about a gardener by the kind of potatoes they grow. Some of us, for example, are traditionalists who’ll plump for the floury, fluffy ‘British Queen’ (colloquially known as ‘Queens’) every time. Others are passionate foodies who prefer the firm, waxy, flavoursome, yellow flesh of a salad potato such as ‘Charlotte’, or the heirloom ‘La Ratte’. Individualists, meanwhile, often like to seek out unusual kinds, such as the dark magenta-fleshed ‘Vitanoire’, or the knobbly ‘Pink Fir Apple’, the heritage variety famed for its more-ishness.

It is best to chit seed potatoes six weeks before planting time. Early potato varieties grown for new potatoes such as ‘Rocket’ and ‘Swift’ are the first ones to chit, ready for planting in late March.

If one of your New Year resolutions is to grow fruit and vegetables, take the time now to design the plot and you will reap the rewards in just a few months. I started six years ago with a blank canvas – just a patch of lawn divided into various spaces, including a vegetable garden. Separated from the rest of the garden by a hornbeam hedge and a trellis of espaliered apples, my vegetable plot is 11.3 x 5.3 metres, with an extra 3.7 metres square tagged onto the side to make it L-shaped. A greenhouse at the far end faces out over three long raised beds and a square bed to the side.

Some people get their kicks from designer labels, others from rummaging through flea shops, or collecting obscure Japanese comics, vintage tractors, handbags, dolls, beer-mats, Star Wars merchandise or whatever else. Me, I get mine from ordering seeds.

This week is a very odd week as there is a 5th Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in the month. Usually I just work the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days of the month so having a 5th is a bonus day off. I worked Wednesday because I always do, but today I was down our local pub, no not for a pint of beer at 9am, but to give their raised beds and various flower beds a tidy up.

It’s that time of year when the seed potatoes I ordered a couple of months ago arrive through the post. It always makes me happy because it means that the growing season is starting.

A long weekend and hardly anything planned. That doesn’t happen very often. Good Friday I worked, but that was because I really needed to finish off someones garden, and another I’d not been to for a month because last time I was due to go we had sleet, snow, hail, basically all that cold horrible weather. Saturday was spent doing shopping and house chores, but Easter Sunday and Bank Holiday Monday were garden days. I had a list as long as my arm, and my arms are very long. I didn’t get through everything in the garden, but I made a huge dent in my list of things to do.

With lockdown slowly easing there is a sense of hope in the air. The vaccination program is going really well in the UK and everyone over 50 has been offered their first jab. We’re all under 50 in our household, so our time hasn’t come quite yet, but hopefully will soon.

The structure that I lovingly constructed for my beans was holding together very nicely until we had the last lot of wind (which had nothing to do with me eating any sprouts). Because the runner beans had grown so thick on one side it was unevenly weighted. Therefore the wind broke all the twine and both sides had drifted apart. Fortunately no canes broke, but I needed something strong to hold them back together again.

The principal requirements of the potato plant are adequate available food, sufficient water, good drainage and the type of soil in which tubers may swell easily. An open, unshaded site is very necessary. Light soils are considered very suitable, provided they have been dressed with large quantities of moisture-retaining organic matter. A heavy soil may also be improved structurally by the addition of organic material. A reasonably light, easily worked loam is probably the ideal. Where farmyard manure is available, it may be dug in during winter digging at the rate of up to 50kg (1cwt) to 6 sq m (6 sq yd). Garden compost may be applied even more generously during winter digging or as a mulch after planting. If a compound potato fertilizer is raked into the soil before planting, use it at the rates advised by the manufacturer.

As winter approaches and we’re faced with another year of determining what's for dinner, we're sharing a glimpse at how BHG readers gather for a meal. Welcome to our new series, Dinner Diaries, where we're asking readers to anonymously share how they get dinner on the table including grocery shopping, budgeting, cooking, and their favorite family recipes. Here, a family of four in the Midwest enjoys eating seasonally. Right now, the menu includes hearty casseroles, soups, and homemade bread.

13 of the Best Purple and Blue Potato Varieties