If you like the feeling of digging up buried treasure, potatoes are the crop for you! We’re going on almost 10 years of growing our entire year’s supply of potatoes every year (or as Karl’s grandpa calls them: spuds!). In my 4-part video series on growing potatoes, I’ll walk you through how to prepare seed potatoes (including how many to get, trusted sources, and how to greensprout or “chit” them). Once they’re in the ground we cover hilling, pest control, harvesting, curing, and storing potatoes. And if you’re interested in saving your own potato seed for growing the following year, I’ll show you how we do that too. I’ll link the first video here for you:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO TUTORIAL FOR HOW TO PREPARE & PLANT SEED POTATOES
Why is proper seed potato prep important?
Greensprouting is basically waking the seed potato up from its long winter’s nap. It’s getting the potatoes to grow some short sprouts before they go in the ground.
Greensprouting:
- prevents the seed potatoes from rotting in the ground
- helps the plants get a jump on outgrowing any weeds
- speeds up growth and will give you an earlier harvest
- encourages more shoots to grow, which will give you a bigger harvest
I know some people just toss seed potatoes in the ground without doing this, and without giving it any thought, but that’s not my style. When I know the best way to do something, that’s how I like to do it. This is the gold standard for growing potatoes, and after growing a LOT of potatoes over the last decade and refining our process as we go, this little bit of extra work has served us well.
What is the greensprouting and planting TIMELINE?
The trickiest part about growing potatoes is getting the prep and planting timing right. This isn’t hard to do, but it is a little precise. Since greensprouting and planting is based off of your last frost date, there’s no one-size fits all schedule.
That’s why I made a (free, no strings attached!) printable sheet you can fill out to create your own personal potato schedule! Once you fill in your last frost date, you can determine your planting date, and then when to start the greensprouting process.
Click here to free printable: SEED POTATO PREP & PLANTING TIMELINE!
When do you prepare seed potatoes for planting?
5-6 Weeks Before Planting: Have Seed Potatoes In Hand
You should have your seed potatoes in hand about 5 to 6 weeks before you plant them out, assuming you get them while they’re still dormant and haven’t sprouted yet, which is usually the case if you’re ordering online.
For this process, you’ll need to know your last frost date. We’re going to start there and work backwards. If you don’t know yours, you can easily look it up using your zip code. The Farmer’s Almanac is a great resources for this.
Once you have that, you can establish your planting date. Potatoes grow best in cool weather, so I like to plant them as early as I possibly can after the danger of frost is gone. This gives them the cooler temps of spring and early summer to grow in, where they will set more potatoes and increase their yield before the heat of summer sets in. I’ve seen firsthand, that if I plant them too late in the season and miss that early cool weather, my yield goes down significantly.
1-2 Weeks Before Last Frost: Plant Seed Potatoes
Once in the ground, potatoes should take about 1 to 2 weeks before their greens emerge. And we are going to use this info to our advantage to get a jump on growing them. Knowing this, I plant my seed 1 to 2 weeks before the last frost. The seed potatoes are protected underground if it does frost, and by the time the greens come up, which *are* susceptible to frost, that danger of frost has passed: make sense? Of course, it can be hard to predict what kind of mood mother nature is going to be in… but now that you have a ballpark planting date, you can determine when to start prepping them.
1 Month Before Planting: Start Greensprouting
About 1 month before planting, we will start greensprouting them, which is a fancy name for simply getting them to sprout. This is also called “chitting.”
Greensprouting has two phases: warmth with darkness, and cool with brightness. For the first week, put the potatoes somewhere around 70ºF, but in the dark to break their dormancy. I put mine in sealed cardboard boxes, which keeps them in the dark dark but allows them to breathe. I put the box on the upper floor of our house, which is always warmer.
After about 1 week you should see little tiny sprouts starting to form! Once this happens, move them to somewhere cooler, ideally around 50ºF, and let them be exposed to light (in a room with a window but not in direct sunlight).
This will keep the sprouts short and fat, and strengthens their attachment point, rather than the sprouts growing long and thin. This is where they will stay for the next 2 to 3 weeks before planting. I know this is very particular, so just try to get as close to these conditions as possible.
Congrats– your spuds are ready for planting!
