Potatoes Ideas, Tips & Guides

Sarah Martens

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

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

Even if you’re growing on a small scale, rotating your crops is important. Grow the same crop in the same soil over and over again and you’re inviting problems, like a build-up of pests and diseases, or nutritional deficiencies in the soil. Another advantage of moving crops around your plot is that you can follow one crop with another that likes growing in the conditions the previous crop left behind: a win-win situation.

Nicholas Sampogna

eye of potato, monkey’s tail….

Alexander Spatari / Getty Images

Ranging from versatile and vitamin-rich vegetables like vibrant ‘Velvet Bean’ to the unique Violet Artichoke, each of these Vegetables that Start With V adds a unique flavor to your plate and a color to your garden!

Greenhouses have an abundance of benefits that can allow you to make the most of your plants. If you’re considering investing in a greenhouse but are still not sure whether to buy one, read on for our ‘need to know’ advice.

Black Vegetables are often overlooked in the traditional garden palette. They have a unique color due to the anthocyanins, a powerful antioxidant that is known to have numerous health benefits.

Morning glory flowers carry profound meanings, from undying love to the resilience of life; they can symbolize many things!

LauriPatterson / Getty Images

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 two-person household relies on garden-fresh produce and well-stocked pantry to get dinner on the table.

Karen Delahay

While picking out the ingredients for my Thanksgiving sweetpotato casserole, I found this sweetpotato full of holes. The holes are tell-tale signs of wireworm feeding.

A light-hearted weekend art project: making some of the pink fir apple potatoes I grew this year look like asteroids!