Hello from Florida! Been looking forward to joining a gardening club for a couple of weeks now. I'm a newbie to the gardening community. But I have lots of questions to ask about my vegetable garden I've been working on. Hope someone has some answers
If you are wanting to 'dig' potatoes for a meal once in a while, you can start doing that when the new potatoes are about 10 weeks old. To harvest the whole patch for winter storage, wait until the vines have turned brown.
I think I will do that. I have two of my potato plants are have flowered and now are dying back just as you have mentioned. But the other plants, come to think of it they were late bloomers. So I guess I will let them stay there longer. Question; Lets say I just left the plant to shrivel up and die, will that effect the potatoes under ground? If I wanted to harvest everything at once.
As long as the weather is dry they can stay in the ground to cure. But if a heavy rain happens they need to be dug up immediately to keep them from rotting in the ground.
My rule-of-thumb is that when the spud plants are in flower....I creep under and dig a little burrow under one of the plants to sneak a preview of how far along they are. I make a judgement upon when I will begin harvesting based on that finding. I prefer early spuds, so I begin eating them as soon as I can. I always plant early to mid-early potato varieties. I have left my spuds in the ground until the foliage had died and crisped. Sometimes I leave them in the ground after I have removed the foliage when the plants had been infected with Phytophthora. Generally, I have not had any problems with the harvest. the individual spuds are generally bigger....sometimes they would have a touch of scab or be hollow inside or split. I have not thoroughly looked into this to see if there was indeed a correlation between being in the ground so long and the incidents that I have mentioned above. Another unfortunate thing that can happen (here in my country, at least) when the spuds are left in the ground so long is that it will give pests more time to find the potatos and bore into them. A certain type of worm and slug can gobble up lots of spuds, given the time. I think these types of things may be regional and may perhaps not pose problems there where you live. I do not know. At any rate, good luck with your crops this year.
Thank you so much for all of your wonderful information. I went ahead and pulled it all out..I. was becoming so inpatient, lol..... I got about 11 or so baby potatoes and I'm getting ready to prepare them, roasted today. I'm going to try it once again to see if I can get a better harvest next time around. Thank you so much guys, I really do appreciate it. Happy Gardening!
