Friday, March 19, 2010

Preparing Potatoes for Planting


This year I am going to grow five different kinds of potatoes in addition to the potatoes that I've started from last year's leftovers.  I purchased certified seed potatoes that are red gold, all blue, carola, banana fingerling, and German butterball.  I chose these varieties based on taste and appearance.  I should have given more thought at the time I ordered to when they would mature.  All of the potatoes except for the all blue are late maturing varieties.  Oh, well.  Live and learn.  Next year, I'll add an early maturing variety and get rid of whichever variety is my least favorite.

The seed potatoes all had several eyes, so I needed to cut any potato that was larger than a golf ball into smaller pieces before planting.  Each piece needed to have at least a couple of eyes.




After I cut the potatoes into smaller pieces, I set them on newspaper to dry overnight.  They needed to form a callus over the cut area so that they would be less likely to rot once planted.

Here are the potatoes two days later with calluses.  

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for posting the picture of the potato with callous! I've been searching high and low, and it is very hard to find good pictures of what they are supposed to look like. My potatoes are starting to look like that now, and I was worried maybe the blackened area was disease. Looks like it might be normal? Did all your potatoes look like that, and did they perform well? Thanks again!

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