planting potatoes

It’s time to plant some more potatoes so we’ll have delicious little new potatoes for end of June and July.

I found this heart potato while I was sorting through my box of French Fingerling seed.  A good omen for April Fool’s Day!

These 50lb. boxes are full of Sieglinde and Blue Russian seed potatoes.  I’m unloading them from my truck here after I picked them up in Vancouver this week and  I’m so happy to get to start planting them.  I also have boxes of Chieftain, Yukon Gold, All Red, French Fingerling and Bananas….great selection this year!

These seed potatoes are a nice smallish size and so I’ve planted 5 in a pot on top of about 4 inches of potting soil, then covered with 1 to 2 inches of the soil….when green shoots emerge, I’ll add more soil and straw, covering the shoots.  The greenery will grow up out of the soil and straw and I’ll cover it again and it will keep growing up and out and I’ll keep covering it ’til the pot’s full.  This kind of mimics the hilling of potatoes that gardeners and growers do when growing them in garden beds and fields. My Dad recently told me that where he was born in the “old country” (northern Yugoslavia, sometimes Hungary at the time) there was a saying that went something like this: “Don’t plant the potatoes so deep that they can’t hear the church bell ring.”  They were religious folk and maybe a little bit is lost in translation here but the message is still clear:  Don’t plant potatoes too deeply…and hill them later, as they grow.