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Gary350
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Short Season Potatoes vs Long Season Potatoes

I found this information online to be very interesting. There are no pictures to copy so I had to make my own drawings.

Short season potatoes are called Determinate Potatoes. After the plants grow about 30 days how every tall they are is where all the potatoes will grow to the plant stem. If you cover your seed potato with 6" of soil and it takes 30 days for the tops to make there way through the soil to sunlight all the potatoes the plants will produce will be below the soil surface. Covering plants & potatoes with more soil after 30 days does not produce more potatoes it only keeps new potatoes out of sunlight.

Long season potatoes are called Indeterminate Potatoes. How ever tall plants are after 30 days has nothing to do with how many potatoes the plant will produce. Plants have the ability to grow potatoes the full length of the plant stem that is covered with soil up to a certain number of days about 65 to 70 days. Keep covering the plants with more soil as they grow to keep sunlight off new potatoes. If you don't cover your plants with more soil they will produce less potatoes. Long season potatoes grow well in hot weather climates.

When plants blossom new potatoes are starting to grow under the soil. When plants above the soil start turning yellow and die plants are finished growing potatoes but do not dig potatoes up yet. Skins are very tender on new potatoes so leave them in the soil until most of the plant is dead about 3 weeks to toughen the skins.

Online says, long season potatoes can produce a crop 2 or more times larger than short season potatoes. It also says, some short season potatoes are large producers that can almost equal a long season potato crop.

Online lists a long list of about 40 or so short season potatoes & about 50 or so long season potatoes that I have never heard of. No pictures, no information, if your interested I guess you need to look them up. The rest of the world had potatoes long before the USA. Andes Mountains has over 125 different varieties of potatoes growing at every elevation up to 12,000. feet.
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Last edited by Gary350 on Tue May 29, 2018 5:46 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Vanisle_BC
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Thanks for that Gary. I've never seen it before; but was puzzled that although books tell me to hill up my potatoes, it has seldom seemed to make much difference to how much my (mostly no name) spuds produce.

This year I'm trying again to grow some from true seed. It was given to me, said to be from a purple potato. I tried it once before and got halfway (pea sized potatoes) but didn't follow through the next year. I like the idea that what kind of potatoes I could get is unpredictable - maybe something never before seen (tasted.)

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applestar
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I’ve read this information on-line before, but I couldn’t have explained it the way you did Gary. The illustrations are extremely helpful too. I feel like I FINALLY understand the process. And thanks for listing the typical varieties. :D

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jal_ut
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Wanna grow potatoes? First you need some potato tubers that have been in storage over winter and have not been treated against sprouting. Now you cut the tubers to one or two eyes per piece. Each eye will produce a plant. There is usually 7 or more eyes on a potato. You don't want that many plants growing in the same spot so you cut them. Now go plant the pieces. Just put them about 2 inches deep. Now wait until the plants are up and about a foot tall, now you hill the plant. This means just scrape a bit of soil from around the plant up toward the plant to add a couple of inches of soil on top of what was there. The reason for doing this is to cover the developing tubers so they won't see the sunlight. If they see the sunlight they get green and develop a bad flavor. There is no other reason to hill potatoes! Have fun!

The tubers form down in the soil that you planted them in. Not in the soil that you hilled them with. O:)

wisconsindead
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jal_ut wrote:Wanna grow potatoes? First you need some potato tubers that have been in storage over winter and have not been treated against sprouting. Now you cut the tubers to one or two eyes per piece. Each eye will produce a plant. There is usually 7 or more eyes on a potato. You don't want that many plants growing in the same spot so you cut them. Now go plant the pieces. Just put them about 2 inches deep. Now wait until the plants are up and about a foot tall, now you hill the plant. This means just scrape a bit of soil from around the plant up toward the plant to add a couple of inches of soil on top of what was there. The reason for doing this is to cover the developing tubers so they won't see the sunlight. If they see the sunlight they get green and develop a bad flavor. There is no other reason to hill potatoes! Have fun!

The tubers form down in the soil that you planted them in. Not in the soil that you hilled them with. O:)
You seem to have missed the point of this post -> Hilling potatoes is worthwhile for some varieties (indeterminate) and not for others (determinate).

Sure, hilling helps prevent green potatoes, but that isn't what Gary was getting at.

Good information Gary. I didn't know there were determinate and indeterminate potatoes.

Vanisle_BC
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Do I detect a degree of polite controversy about hilling/not hilling potatoes. Great fun; this must be a gardening forum!

Taiji
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That is really enlightening! I didn't know about those differences in potato varieties either. I would have guessed Red Pontiacs were long season but I guess not. That is some great info. I've always had good luck with the especially early Red Norlands and Red Pontiacs in AZ, but will have to try some Russets.

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jal_ut
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What do I know about potatoes? Well my family was a pioneering family. They came here to this wild Utah land when it was nothing but a sagebrush flat. Well here in High Dry Utah we only get about 13 inches of rain in a year, most of which comes as snow in January and February. So to get a crop to grow irrigation was necessary. The first thing the settlers did was divert the rivers and streams to their farmland to irrigate their late planted crops. Corn, beans, squash and potatoes , (what I call the big four) are the plants from which they fed their families. Pits were dug to put the potatoes in for winter storage.
So I tell you what I know about potatoes and I get: "You seem to have missed the point of this post"

OK, seems I missed the point. I will shut up and go somewhere else to play! O:)

Vanisle_BC
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Is there a connection between whether potato plants have flowers, and whether they're determinate; assuming there is such a thing :)?

In the past I think some of my varieties have flowered and others have not. The ones I have growing now are a mixed lot of forgotten tubers that had sprouted in the back of a drawer. I no longer know what any of them is but I'm flagging the ones that have flower buds. I haven't been hilling any but I'll see if I can deduce anything about patterns of tuber growth vs flowering, at harvest time.

wisconsindead
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jal_ut wrote:What do I know about potatoes? Well my family was a pioneering family. They came here to this wild Utah land when it was nothing but a sagebrush flat. Well here in High Dry Utah we only get about 13 inches of rain in a year, most of which comes as snow in January and February. So to get a crop to grow irrigation was necessary. The first thing the settlers did was divert the rivers and streams to their farmland to irrigate their late planted crops. Corn, beans, squash and potatoes , (what I call the big four) are the plants from which they fed their families. Pits were dug to put the potatoes in for winter storage.
So I tell you what I know about potatoes and I get: "You seem to have missed the point of this post"

OK, seems I missed the point. I will shut up and go somewhere else to play! O:)
Can you confirm/deny what Gary said about indeterminate/determinate potatoes? I am struggling to confirm it, or find a really good answer as to the difference between long day/short day determinate/indeterminate hilling etc



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