Right now, I’m harvesting big bowls of potatoes—mostly purple, red and yellow spuds that I’ll roast, boil, fry, bake or mash with garlic and butter. If you haven’t grown potatoes before, put it on your gardening bucket list. Homegrown potatoes have an incredible flavor. Once you try them, you’ll be hooked.

Unusual Potatoes to Grow

Among our favorites are the French fingerlings, long slender potatoes that command big bucks in stores and at farmers’ markets. Rather than grow common varieties, such as red-skinned or baking potatoes that you can buy anywhere, I look for unusual ones like Purple Viking, which has dark purple skin and pure white flesh. German Butterball is a creamy golden yellow and there are many others that add great taste and color to a meal. We also grow Purple Majesty and Magic Molly, oblong tubers with purple skin and violet flesh that are as tasty as they are unique.

If you have a spot in your garden that gets at least six to eight hours of direct sun in the summer, you can grow potatoes. They grow just fine in large 15-gallon pots, fiber planting bags, raised beds, and in trenches. Plant five pounds of “seed” (small) potatoes in spring and you can harvest between 40 to 50 pounds of tubers by late summer. Standard potatoes yield about 10 times what you plant in spring, while fingerling potatoes yield from 15 to 20 times the amount planted.

Getting Started

Late summer and early fall are good times to prepare the vegetable garden for spring potato planting. They grow best in fertile, well-drained soil. I add compost, finely chopped leaves, and other organic amendments to “lighten” our soil, which has a lot of clay. I also grow potatoes in pots filled with a soil-less potting mix intended for vegetables.

After the danger of spring frost has passed, I start planting “seed” potatoes–small tubers with “eyes” that sprout leaves. If you’ve ever had an old potato that sprouted, that sprout of leaves comes from the eye. Many garden centers sell bags of seed potatoes. Small tubers can be planted whole, but I cut the larger tubers into small pieces so that each one has at least one or two eyes. The cut seed potatoes dry for a few days before we plant them. Buy them locally in early spring or order them online. Don’t use grocery store potatoes—you’re better off buying seed potatoes that are certified as disease-free.