First Yellow Finn Potato Harvest of 2008

This year I repeated growing potatoes in tree growing pots as I’ve done in years past. Last year I mostly grew small red potatoes and yellow finn potatoes. This year I’m growing russets, red fingerlings, white potatoes and yellow finns. Each variety is growing in its own tree pot.

This year it seems the crops are coming in much later. Last year, I wrote a post on growing potatoes  that might be the set of helpful hints you’re looking for if you’re considering putting in potato plants of your own. In it, I mentioned my red potato harvest in mid-July 2007. This year, I dug my first potatoes about a week ago, so the last week of July 2008.

This year my first harvest was a small batch of yellow finns. The plants didn’t make it to flowering before they withered and I dug them out. They did give me a few dozen potatoes none-the-less. And, they’re tender, sweet and oh-so-tasty!

So, why did they whither?  Well, in speaking with a plant pathologist friend last year about this same problem, it seems that there may have been too much water. When I dug out the potatoes, the bottom 3″ of the pots were fairly saturated. This year I had been holding off on the watering, but it seems they still got more than they needed. We had a fairly rainy late spring, which probably didn’t help. The batches of yellow finns that had the problem were from tubers I’d put in the earliest this spring, so they’d managed to “weather the storm” for quite a while, putting on some decent tubers before giving up the ghost.

I’d also done some more reading about potatoes this year and learned they really don’t like a lot of nutrition in the soil, so I held off on adding fertilizers. I had used good potting soil in some cases, which they seemed to like (other than the good water holding capacity). But, what I’ve decided to do is recycle the soil (as long as I don’t see disease forming in the plants and pots) and see how potatoes continue to perform as they deplete the soil more and more.

Red Fingerling Potato Plant

So, let’s see…cut back on water, don’t feed the plants, and what do I get? Well, the plant on the right is my red fingerling plant. The stems are strong and its blooming away happily. We had a downpour a little less than a week ago, but other than that I’ve curtailed its water significantly. So far so good.

And, in the pots from which I harvested my first and my second batches of yellow finns, I have started new crops. The pot I planted as recently as 2 weeks ago already has significant new top growth. The question is: “Will it have time to put on tubers before the end of the growing season?” Regardless, so far so good!

One note to self for future plantings: It seems that if the seed potato is planted somewhat shallow, the plants produce less new tubers. If the original seed potato is planted deeply, the plant will fill the container with more tubers as it grows upward. It is less likely to put down tubers lower in the pot…but maybe that’s because the soil was “over-moist” in my early spring containers. Maybe not. The plantings I put in just a couple of weeks ago that are showing new growth were seeded deeply. Perhaps the answer will come sooner rather than later.