One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato ... More! (Published 1997) (2024)

A neighbor in south-central Pennsylvania, being of Irish descent and a die-hard traditionalist, insists on planting potatoes on St. Patrick's Day. This usually means that within a couple of weeks he is back out in the potato patch, heaping on straw mulch to protect his sprouting spuds from late freezes. Apparently the climate is different in Ireland.

Potatoes have a reputation for hardiness, which is why most gardeners plant them far too early. It's worth remembering that they are in the Solanaceae family, along with tomatoes and eggplants. Hard frost kills potato foliage, so plant no sooner than two weeks before you expect the last frost.

Of course, some gardeners don't plant potatoes at all, assuming that they are space-hungry vegetables ill suited to small gardens. It's true that the average garden will not yield enough potatoes to stock up the root cellar for the winter, but not many gardeners have root cellars anyway.

A single plant will produce, at a minimum, three or four pounds of potatoes, and a single seed potato will produce four or five plants. If you plant the seed pieces a foot or so apart in a row, with a couple of feet of space on either side of the row, you will use about 25 square feet of garden space to produce about 20 pounds of potatoes.

That's not as good as with, say, green beans or tomatoes, but it beats sweet corn. And the rewards can be considerable. You could, for instance, eat real new potatoes.

New potatoes are potatoes dug while the plant is still alive and green. They are sweet, because the potato sugars have not yet begun to turn to starch. What supermarkets sell as new potatoes are often simply small, mature potatoes, usually red. Mature potatoes are dug when the potato vine has died. At that point the skin has toughened and the flesh is starchy, which makes for better storage qualities but not a sublime culinary experience.

If you grow potatoes, you can also indulge yourself in varieties that are unavailable in supermarkets, like Swedish Peanut (a long, thin, fingerling type with golden flesh) or Cranberry Red. (It's pink inside.) Both are available from Wood Prairie Farm (49 Kinney Road, Bridgewater, Me. 04735; 800-829-9765; free catalogue). Another good source is Ronniger's Seed Potatoes (P.O. Box 1838, Orting, Wash. 98360); it will send a free catalogue if requested by postcard, and it offers dozens of varieties, including the Irish favorite Kerr's Pink and the delightful fingerling Anna Cheeka's Ozette.

While you're waiting for the season to be settled enough to plant potatoes, you can get a jump by pre-sprouting the seed potatoes. Keep them in shade at room temperature until small white sprouts emerge from the eyes. (This will take from a few days to a week or more, depending on how the potatoes have been stored.) Then move them into the light so the sprouts can start producing chlorophyll and ''green up.''

Pre-sprouting the spuds increases yield, and also reduces the chance that the seed potatoes will rot in the soil if the weather turns cold and rainy after planting.

When the sprouts are about half an inch long, cut the potatoes into pieces the size of a hen's egg or larger, with at least two sprouts or eyes to a piece. Some potatoes have few eyes, so the pieces will be bigger. You should get about four pieces from an average-size seed potato. Fingerling potatoes have many eyes, and can produce as many as six seed pieces.

In the garden, make a trench 2 to 3 inches deep, with loose soil on both sides, and place the seed pieces 8 to 16 inches apart. You will get smaller potatoes at closer spacing, which is not a disadvantage if you intend to dig the patch early for new potatoes to steam whole. Fingerlings, which tend to produce small potatoes anyway, should get wider spacing unless you want lots of potatoes the size of peanuts.

Cover the seed pieces with no more than two inches of soil. Some gardening guides suggest deep planting, but shallower planting will result in faster emergence.

When the potato plants are about six inches high, hill them by drawing soil up around the plants so that only the top leaves are above ground. This is a critical step if you want lots of potatoes. Potatoes form tubers only on the stem that is underground and above the seed piece. The more soil you pile around the potato plant, the longer that stem will be and the more potatoes you will get. You can hill a second time, even a third, as the potato plant grows.

The method works perfectly well even if you're growing potatoes in a container. I once produced a respectable crop in a whisky half-barrel, planting the potatoes when the barrel was half filled with soil and then adding layers of soil until the barrel was full. Four seed pieces yielded nearly 30 pounds of potatoes.

Straw mulch, rather than soil, can be piled around the plant as it grows, as long as it is dense enough to keep light from reaching the forming tubers. Sunlight will cause the potato to produce the toxic alkaloid solanine in its skin, turning it green. (If any potato has green skin, peel it off before eating the potato.)

The disadvantage to the mulch technique is that mice and squirrels sometimes dive into the straw and find the potatoes before you do.

When the plant starts blooming, you can start harvesting new potatoes. If you don't want to sacrifice the whole plant, dig gingerly into the side of the hill with a trowel or your fingers and feel for potatoes. The plant won't mind if you filch a few.

After flowering, the vine dies back, signaling that its potatoes are mature. Dig the whole plant then, and let the potatoes dry on the ground or in a warm, shady place. This will help the skin toughen so the tubers can be stored.

Now, don't you feel just a little bit Irish?

THIS WEEK

Cut, Plant, Clip and Hug a Tree

Take cuttings of geraniums and begonias, to festoon the porch this summer.

Plant new perennials, paying attention to how much space, light and water they need. The temptation is to jam too many plants too close together. Keep an eye out for plant sales at local botanical gardens and plant societies; they have interesting specimens, for good prices.

When tulips, daffodils and other bulbs finish blooming, clip off the spent flower, to keep the bulb from using energy to make a seed pod. But don't cut back any leaves. They make energy from the sun, to feed the bulb for next year's blooms.

Plant a tree for Arbor Day, on Friday, but don't forget to take care of it. Choose the right tree for the site (sun, shade, dry or moist), and take some time digging a wide, deep hole. Water well, mulch and watch over it during dry months.

Two tips from the Sprig and Twig Garden Club of Dover, Del.:

*Stick a few cloves of garlic in the soil around your rose bushes to keep down mildew, black spot and aphids.

*Sprinkle crushed, dried eggshells around plants to keep away slugs and snails.

Who knows? They might work. ANNE RAVER