I harvested the first 'Red Norland' potatoes from my garden recently. I think my days of planting grocery store potatoes is over, because these guys were absolutely perfect. I guess there is an advantage of starting with certified seed potatoes. The grocery store ones weren't that bad, but these are great!
I have only harvested a few so far (I want to let the rest size up a bit), but they were very tasty and creamy.
Unfortunately, I wasn't so lucky with my certified mail order seed potatoes this year. Half of them developed a weird disease and rotted before I was able to get them into the ground.
ReplyDeleteYuck! I guess it's kind a crap shoot then.
ReplyDeleteHow do you know when potatoes are ready to harvest?
ReplyDeleteYou can generally start harvesting new potatoes once the plants start to flower. If you want larger potatoes, wait until the plant starts to dry out and die back (I'm not sure if they are supposed to die back in the middle of the summer, but mine always do). You want to get them out of the ground before the plants completely die.
ReplyDeleteWow.. that sure is early for potatoes and they look delicious. In CT my Yukons and banana fingerlings haven't even started flowering yet. I don't use seed potatoes to keep costs down. I save a batch from the crop that year, when the eyes start to come out, I plant them and let them over winter in the soil.
ReplyDeleteI have thought about using last year's potatoes as seed, but they don't usually survive that long. They've generally withered away to nothing by the time planting time comes around (winter is very very long here, so it's too long to keep stuff in storage).
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