How to Plant Potatoes

Hi! I'm Doug Smiddy at Smiddy's Gardening Services here on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today we are going to talk about how to plant, grow and harvest potatoes. Planting the potatoes, we don't want to plant the whole potato and I'll tell you why. If you'll look you'll see on this potato it has many many eyes. Each one of those eyes is going to produce a plant of its own. So out of this one potato we can get many different potato plants. So we are going to have to figure out how to cut this so there is 1 to 2 eyes per piece. You can see there are a few pieces on the end here so I am going to cut one piece like that. You don't really want them any smaller than that. They say to cut them between 1 1/2 ounces to 2 1/2 ounces but who in the heck is actually going to weigh a piece of potato before you plant them. Here is another piece with 2 eyes. Go at an angle here, just like that and let's see this third piece I see an eye right there and regardless of how small it is, it will produce another potato. When you choose your potatoes which I think is very very important, always use a certified seed potato. That is very very important. They are disease resistant and you are going to get much better results as opposed to a supermarket potato that has actually been sprayed with a growth retardant which is going to stop those eyes from growing. So go to your local garden center and buy a certified seed potato. We've cut the potatoes 2 days before we plant and the reason we did that is we want those cuts to heal and you just put them in a paper bag or pantry closet or something like that where they have a little air circulation until they heel and what they are going to look like you are going to see the difference. That is a heeled potato. It's got a nice scab over where you cut it and we are ready to plant.