How to Grow Potatoes in Your Home Garden

Potatoes are a rewarding crop that gives you a high yield as long as you provide them with the right growing conditions. Once planted, they need minimal tending until harvest time. Best of all, potatoes store well so that you can enjoy your harvest for months (melting potatoes, anyone?).

Here’s how to grow potatoes at home—and we’re talking “standard,” not sweet potatoes—from planting, watering, and hilling to harvesting and storing. Potatoes thrive in just about every U.S. gardening zone, but before pulling on your garden gloves, choose from among any of your favorite types of potatoes and let the growing begin!

Types of Potatoes to Plant

There are three factors to consider when choosing a type of potato to grow.

Culinary Quality

The most important consideration for selecting which potato variety to grow is how you plan to cook with them. Some varieties are more suitable for mashing, baking, frying, or roasting based on their starch content.

• Waxy potatoes—like red and fingerlings—have a lower starch content, thinner skin, and hold their shape well, so they’re best for potato salads, boiling, and roasting.
• All-purpose potatoes—Yukon gold, white, yellow, blue, and purple varieties—are the Goldilocks of potatoes: not too waxy and not too starchy. If you want to grow only one variety, this would be a good choice.
• Starchy potatoes—like Idaho and russets—are best for baking, mashing, and frying, as well as for soups and casseroles. (When boiled, they break down into a mushy mess.)

Maturation Time

Planting varieties with different maturity times gives you a continuous supply of fresh potatoes over several months. Potatoes are generally categorized into three groups:

• Earlies require only 75 to 90 days underground, sometimes fewer. They’re usually small, so they take up less room in the garden than other varieties, and they’re less prone to potato blight. Earlies generally have thin skin, so they don’t store very long (a few weeks). Red Gold is a popular variety.
• Mid-season potatoes, also referred to as “second earlies, mature in 95 to 110 days. They’re typically harvested in mid-summer and store for about a month. Yukon Gold is the most famous variety in this group.
• Late season varieties, sometimes called “maincrops,” are ready for harvest in 120 to 160 days. They generally have thicker skin, are large, and store for a good, long while (2 to 3 months). An exception is fingerlings, which belong to this group but are small and have thin skin.

Growth Pattern

A third consideration for selecting potatoes is the variety’s growth pattern:

• Determinate potatoes are a good selection for container-planting because they produce tubers in a single layer just below the soil surface. They need a thick layer of mulch to protect the tubers from sunlight.
• Indeterminate potatoes form tubers vertically and benefit from hilling to ensure a more plentiful crop.

How to Plant Potatoes

Potatoes are grown using a “hilling” technique. The seeds are planted deep, and the stems are buried gradually by hilling up additional soil around the plant as it grows upward. Here’s how to get started with an initial planting.

What You’ll Need

• Garden plot or container in full sun
• Loose, well-draining soil
• Hand trowel
• Gardening gloves
• Seed potatoes
• Mulch

Step 1: Choose a Seed Potato

The best way to start new potato plants is to use fresh seed potatoes, which differ from grocery store potatoes in that they’re certified disease-free and not treated with chemicals. Plants from seed potatoes give you better yields, are less prone to disease, and offer you a larger variety of species not found in the grocery store. You’ll find seed potatoes sold in garden centers, farm stores, nurseries, and seed companies.

Step 2: Wait Until Cool Weather

Potatoes are cool-weather crops, so the best time to plant them is early spring, as soon as the soil is workable. They can tolerate a light frost, so plant them 2 to 3 weeks before your last frost date or as soon as the soil reaches 45°F. (Look for a soil thermometer for an accurate reading.) If you get a forecast for a late-season heavy frost, you need to cover those potato plants until the threat is over.

Step 3: Prepare the Garden Bed

Potatoes are root vegetables that grow deep into the soil, so they grow best in loose, well-draining, slightly acidic soil. If you have heavy clay soil—which retains water and gets hard when it dries, making it hard for tuber-type plants to grow—mix compost or fertilizer into the soil before planting.

While most gardeners grow potatoes in the ground, they can also thrive in raised garden beds, containers, and grow bags. Whatever you plant them in, make sure they get at least 6 hours of direct sunlight per day. That means ensuring your potato plants won’t grow in the shadow of fences, trellises, or other plants.

Step 4: Prepare the Seed Potato

When you get your seed potatoes, they probably won’t have sprouts yet. To encourage sprouting, place those seed potatoes in a sunny area (indoors or outdoors)—where temperatures are between 60 and 70°F—a week or two before planting.

Seed potatoes smaller than 2 inches can be planted whole. If you have larger seed potatoes, cut them into 2-inch pieces. Use a sharp, clean knife and ensure there’s an eye or bud on each piece. Do this a day or so before planting them outdoors to allow the cut potatoes to callous over. This step helps improve rot resistance and water retention once planted.

Step 5: Dig a Trench and Plant

Dig a trench 6 to 8 inches in the ground. Plant seed potatoes cut-side down with the eyes pointing up. Space them 12 to 15 inches apart, and space rows at least 3 feet apart.

Step 6: Cover the Seeds and Mulch

Cover the seed potatoes with 4 inches of soil. Once seedlings emerge, add a layer of mulch to conserve moisture, help with weed control, and keep the soil cool.

Step 7: Wait to Water

Most just-planted garden crops benefit from being watered-in, meaning the delivery of a good dose of water to get their growth started, but potato plants are an exception. Seed potatoes are prone to disease if subjected to too much moisture, so it’s best to wait until the potato plants sprout above ground before watering them.

Potato Plant Care

Under optimal conditions, potato plants will grow to produce tubers that are large and numerous.

Light

In very hot conditions, a modest amount of shade helps protect potato plants from too much sun, especially in the afternoon, and cools the soil, which potatoes prefer. However, consistently low light levels slow down a potato plant’s photosynthesis, which means the plant will produce fewer leaves and, in turn, fewer and smaller potatoes.

Soil

Potatoes grow best in loose, well-draining soil with plenty of room for their tubers to expand. The soil should be slightly acidic, pH 5.8 to 6.5. Good soil is rich and dark, forming small clumps when you handle it.

Clay soil is the arch-enemy (soil-wise) of potato plants because it holds lots of water and doesn’t drain well. This leaves your potato plant in a too-wet condition, which fosters fungi and disease. To test the soil to see if your garden has clayey soil, grab a handful. If the soil sticks together and you can mold it (like a ball of clay), you have clay soil. 

Water

Ideally, potato plants growing above ground need between 1 and 2 inches of water per week. If you’re unsure about exactly what that means, you might benefit from purchasing a rain gauge, which is a small, usually plastic collector that’s secured in the ground. Once positioned in the potato plot, water as usual—by hand or by irrigation—to see how much watering (including rainwater) results in 1 to 2 inches.

The best way to water potatoes is via a soaker hose, an irrigation system that lays atop the soil. Otherwise, it’s best to water the soil without soaking the leaves, because bacteria loves moisture and you don’t want to encourage it to grow on the potato plant’s foliage. If wet foliage is unavoidable, water your potato plants early in the day, allowing the foliage to dry out in the afternoon.

Temperature

While the ideal soil temperature range for planting potatoes is 45 to 50°F, potato plants grow best in warmer temperatures, optimally between 60 and 70°F. Temps that are too hot or too cold stunt the plant’s growth and, at worst, prevent it from developing tubers.

As a cool-season vegetable, potatoes can withstand a light frost (when the temperature dips below freezing), but new sprouts will die off if Mother Nature brings a late-season hard frost to your garden. Never fear though, new sprouts will likely emerge when temperatures rise, and the plant will likely survive.

Hilling Potatoes

Hilling, a gardening technique that’s rather unique to potatoes, is an important part of growing them. The process, which starts once the plant grows to about 6 inches tall, consists of continuously mounding the soil around each plant as it grows. The goal is to bury roughly one-third of the potato plant.

One reason for hilling is to produce more potatoes. The technique encourages stem growth, providing more sites for potatoes to form underground. You can hill potatoes as high as you want, but rain and wind will erode the hills unless you contain them with something like rocks or bricks. You can keep hilling until the above-ground part of the plant is a foot (or higher) or the potato plant blooms.

Another reason to hill potatoes is to prevent sunlight from reaching the tubers. Too much sunlight causes tubers to turn green and produce solanine, a toxic compound that induces nausea. You’d have to consume a lot of green potatoes to experience negative side effects, but you want your hard work to result in edible, healthy potatoes.

When and How to Harvest Potatoes

A potato plant is ready to harvest in 70 to 90 days after emerging from the soil, depending on the variety. If you’ve lost count of the days, the plants are ready to harvest when the foliage begins to die back.

If you can’t wait that long, you can harvest baby potatoes (also called “new potatoes”) about 2 to 3 weeks after the plants are done flowering. Carefully dig around the plant without disturbing it, and remove only a few potatoes near the top of the soil, no more than you plan to eat immediately.

To harvest full-sized potatoes:

1. Wait until 2 to 3 weeks after the foliage dies back, and refrain from picking until after a few days of dry weather.
2. Use a sturdy garden fork to carefully dig up the potatoes, avoiding the temptation of pulling up the plant by its stem.

After harvesting, set aside any potatoes you plan to eat within a week or two, and prepare the rest for curing, a process that helps potatoes last in storage longer. To cure them, brush off any remaining soil, but refrain from washing them.

Set potatoes in a protected area—like a garage, covered porch, or basement—that is dry, cool (45 to 60°F), and dark for up to 2 weeks. To enhance air circulation and prevent high humidity, consider setting up a fan in the area.

The Best Way to Store Potatoes

Potatoes can last for months as long as you provide plenty of ventilation, a cool temperature (between 42 and 55°F), high humidity, and no light. Typically, an unheated basement or garage is ideal for storing potatoes, but if you live in a warm area, consider storing potatoes in an extra refrigerator set to a higher-than-normal temperature. Too-warm temperatures can encourage sprouting and disease.

Dealing With Common Pests and Diseases

Although potatoes are easy to grow once established in the garden, you may enounter some of these common pests and problems:

• Colorado potato beetles feed on potato foliage as adults and larvae. Pick them off or use BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) spray (found at garden supply stores) to kill larvae.
• Flea beetles are tiny black or brown insects that damage foliage. Use row covers early in the season as soon as you see evidence of them. To prevent or deter them, rotate crops and maintain high levels of organic matter in the soil.
• Aphids are tiny insects that damage plants by sucking juices from the leaves and stems of plants. Insecticidal soap sprays are an effective way to control them.
• Scab is the most common fungus that damages a potato crop, and it can live in the soil for years. To fight it, practice crop rotation, maintain healthy soil, and only use certified seed potatoes.
• Blight is the most common disease that affects potatoes. The best way to prevent it is to practice crop rotation, keep your soil healthy, and start with certified seed potatoes.