Potatoes are frost tender so you must make an informed guess as to when the best time to plant in your area is. We usually begin planting a few weeks before the last frost is expected to get in early potatoes, so that will vary widely around NZ. in the far North and warm areas you can plant in July, in the far South you may only be able to plant in November December. Apart from the frost factor we also have to take the psyllid problem into account. basically the warmer it is the more active psyllids there will be around so it seems to be best to plant your potatoes as early as you can plant them in all areas to avoid these pests as far as possible. certainy in the warmer areas we need to hav them in the ground in August to avoid these pests. having a bale of hay (or alternative) around to cover emerging new potato tops could be a good strategy! Potatoes are also heavy feeders so f you are planning on growing a large healthy crop you must provide the nutrition if it is not there to begin with.

Cultivation

The Henry Double day Association did a lot of potato research years ago and found in their trials that they obtained their best crops by placing wilted comfrey leaves in the bottom of their potato trenches under the seed potatoes, and also that planting seed potatoes that had long (20cm) shoots increased yields.

We store our seed potatoes in onion sacks under the verandah in the light but not the rain. They shoot but the shoots remain short and stubby. 4 weeks beforre planting you can lay your seed potatoes out into flats and place in the dark where they will grow long shoots.

There are many ways to plant potatoes once they have shoots. Seed potato are generally about egg size but if you have saved your own seed and you saved the best and biggest then you can cut them up into pieces with eyes/shoots and dip each cut side in wood ash, or agnihotra ash to seal them. Leaving them in the sun for a few hours will help too.

Firstly I soak them over night in a solution that contains cow manure and seedling innoculant, possibly seaweed solution or other nutritious liquid feed to strengthen and protect the tubers as they grow.

We make two trenches in our 1.2m wide beds along the whole length of the bed, .3m in from each edge. that leaves equal amounts of soil each side of each trench to hill the emerging plants up. We then add our fertiliser of choice, mine will be highly mineralised aerobic biologically active compost , and also wilted comfrey leaves. If I didn't have super high quality compost would be putting .2kgs of natures garden in each metre of potato row.I aim for high brix potatoes so that they are less likely to be affected by blight and pests like psyllids or potato tuber moth. I place my potatoes 30cm apart on the wilted comfrey leaves then 10cm of soil over them. Enough to keep the potato tuber moths out and still enable to shoots to find their way up and leaving enough soil to hill them up twice at later stages.

Once the tops emerge I brix test with my refractometer to see what the reading is. if it is less than 12 I will topdress with either 100gms of EFNature's Garden per metre of row and / or EF VegeFoliar or compost tea etc on a weekly basis depending on what the refractometer tells me is most beneficial. To keep blight and psyllids away and high quality potatoes for eating aim for a brix of 12.

Some people prefer to mulch heavily after the first soil covering or even instead of covering with soil at all. It is very important to keep the tuber moths out and deep covering is needed to do that.

Once the tops are up and around 20cm high you can ridge them up from both sides and then your bed will have two ridges down it. They can be ridged up again just before they flower. There seems to be a relationship between holding the stems up and the size of the crop that follows. If you don't have enouh soil to do a good job of this then maybe look at heavy mulching with anything available. Harvest your potatoes when the flowers are finished and the tops are dying back. refer to the potato seed saving page for seed saving techniques