Homegrown Popcorn and Potato Chips: How-To

Growing your own popcorn or potatoes is actually pretty easy.  Popcorn grows just like regular corn, although the stalks are sometimes shorter and sturdier.  Choose a variety specifically for popping from a seed catalog or your favorite local seed spot.  You can plant corn anytime now--frost danger should be past, and the next week should heat up enough to help dry soil a bit.  One of the big benefits of NOT planting with a huge machine is that you can plant when the soil would still be too wet to host a tractor.  You can guess how much sympathy the 'conventional' farmers get from me... especially those who use mono-crop techniques supported by petro-fertilizers.  Yucksters.

Potatoes take a bit more care throughout the season than corn, but they are quite easy to grow.  Start with seed potatoes or organic potatoes.  They should be plentiful with 'eyes,' the sprouting bits.

On a dry day (windy is even better, but not necessary) cut the 'taters into smaller sections, making sure to leave at least on eye on each section.  Opinion on this varies:  some people leave 2-3 eyes per chunk, some just one.  Either way, don't just bury a whole potato covered in eyes--the plant will be too crowded and won't produce nearly as much as if you section it out.  Once you've cut your chunks, leave them cut-side-up in a shady, well ventilated spot until they dry on the surface.  This will avoid risk of rotting when you plant.

Once the cut surfaces are dry, place each chunk about 8 inches apart in the bottom of a trench and cover with soil.  As sprouts appear, continually mound soil up around the growing stalks--this increases the depth at which the plant will produce potatoes, and keeps mature 'taters dark so they won't turn green (toxic).  So when you see six inches of sprout, cover five and let an inch peek out until the next time.  You'll probably end up repeating this process between six and a dozen times over the season, depending on the growth habit of the potato (and your own habits).  (For info on harvesting, check back in a few weeks!)

Of course there are as many creative ways to grow potatoes in makeshift containers as there are complaints about Michigan weather (stacked tires, cages, slat boxes, garbage bags...) and there are many pros and cons to these techniques.  But you don't need extra stuff to grow potatoes: treat them like a regular row vegetable and you can integrate them easily into your garden.

Have you tried some more involved potato tricks?  Share them below!

Comments

[Allan]

Last season I tried growing potatoes for the first time. Used a "soil-less" method, where I planted the eyes atop of about 4 inches of soil in a large plastic garbage bag. Then through the growing season covered with straw, as mentioned above, leaving an inch or so exposed. I planted way late in the season (July), but still had a harvest of small potatoes. The value of the straw method...is the potatoes come out clean! The reward in growing potatoes...they are so much sweeter than what you can buy in the store! Definitely, going into the garden again this year :)