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Potatoes have been much maligned with the low carb diets and emphasis on calories and brightly coloured vegetables, but the potato is a valuable nutritious food.

Potatoes are starchy tubers that grow underground, swelling and getting larger as the top half of the plant matures. I am growing a crop of five varieties of potatoes on the roadside verge of our country summer retreat home, here in Northern Victoria. They require little attention aside from a morning watering if there has been no rain.

Potatoes are very inexpensive to buy, some people might wonder why you would bother growing your own, as a gardener, I see them as having two great advantages. They are a wonderful, first crop into the ground.  I mulch my potatoes as they grow, then dig this mulch and the dried foliage of the potatoes into the ground after I harvest the potato and this greatly improves the soil, leaving it full of vegetable fibre, nutritious, friable and moisture retaining, ready for growing a more demanding of soil quality crop the following year.

My homegrown potatoes will be chemical free. It is a small private country road, only used by a few residents, only one resident up the road, past us, so there is no passing exhaust pollution. This will be a very healthy vegetable crop once matured.

Potatoes do not need a rich soil so are the ideal first crop. They are more at risk of disease if grown in the same soil where you grew potatoes or tomatoes the previous year. can be finicky to grow, because of pest and disease problems. Being high up on the roadside bank the ground is well drained so there is no risk of rot.

Latin Name  Solanum tuberosum

Common Name: Potato

Exposure: Full / Partial Sun

Size: Varies widely with variety. I am growing five varieties.

Harvesting: Days from planting  to Harvest: 2 - 4 Months.

The entire crop is ready to harvest once the tops of the plants die off. You can leave the potatoes in the ground for a few weeks longer, as long as the ground is not wet.

New potatoes are small, immature potatoes. You can harvest a few of these without harm to the plant, by gently feeling around in the soil near the plant, once the plant reaches about a foot in height.

Harvest carefully, by hand or with a shovel. Turn the soil over and search through for treasure. The tubers can branch out and digging in with a fork is a sure fire way of stabbing a potato or two.

Growing Conditions & Maintenance:

What to Plant: Seed potatoes aren’t really seeds at all. They are full-size potatoes that are allowed to start producing shoots in the potato eyes. You’ve probably seen this happen when you’ve stored potatoes in the kitchen for too long.

Seed potatoes can be planted whole or cut into pieces, with each piece containing an eye or two

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