Tag Archives: beginner garden

7 Tips for Growing Potatoes

April 16, 2024 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Potatoes can be one of the easiest staple crops to grow, providing pounds of food for relatively little effort. Unfortunately, they can also have many problems! If you’ve struggled to grow large harvests of good-quality potatoes, you’re not alone. Thankfully, there are a few simple steps to take to have a more successful year. Here are our best tips for growing potatoes.

Always Rotate Your Potatoes & Nightshades

Unfortunately, potatoes are susceptible to a number of diseases, including the destructive pathogen Phytophthora infestans, which caused the late potato blight of the notorious potato famine.

  One of the best ways to avoid this and other diseases is to always rotate your potato crops, ideally on a three to four-year rotation. This rotation should include all the other nightshades that could play host to the same diseases, including peppers, tomatoes, tomatillos, okra, and eggplants. Don’t plant any of these in the same bed for three to four years.

Water Consistently While Growing Potatoes

  Many folks don’t irrigate potatoes even if they water their other crops. The assumption is that potatoes are a bit tougher. While they are in some ways, inconsistent watering can lead to decreased production and serious issues like hollow heart a type of cell death inside the tuber that creates a hollow in the center.  

Potatoes should receive 1 to 2 inches of water or rain per week. This is crucial while they’re flowering and forming tubers. When the potato plants start to turn yellow and die back, you can discontinue watering to allow for a drier, easier harvest.

Flowering potato plant with potato beetle larvae

Watch for Potato Beetles  

Colorado potato beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) can be a major issue for many gardeners, defoliating entire plants. Unfortunately, they’re resistant to many pesticides, both organic and conventional. The best way to deal with them is to watch for them carefully and handpick them into a bucket of soap water. You can also smash the eggs and larvae.

Check out this helpful University of Minnesota Extension article to learn how to identify them in their different life stages. 

Get Your Soil Tested   for Growing Potatoes

Potatoes aren’t super picky, but they do perform best in specific soil conditions. Light, well-drained soil that’s rich in organic matter is ideal. They thrive in acidic soil when the pH is 4.8 – 5.5. Potatoes are more susceptible to scab in soil with a pH of 6.0 or higher.

  Potatoes also need good levels of certain nutrients. To produce well, they need decent levels of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. Low potassium levels can also contribute to issues like hollow heart. Adding good quality compost to your soil can help with these things, but it’s worth getting a soil test, especially if you’ve had problems in the past.  

Hill Up Your Potatoes When the Stems Reach 6 to 8 Inches Tall

  Re-burying your potato stems may seem like an odd idea, especially if you’re new to gardening, but it is crucial for good potato harvests. Potatoes produce tubers along the stem; when you hill them up so that only the top leaves stick out of the soil, new potatoes form along the stem in the new section of soil.  

Hilling potatoes also helps with weed and moisture control and minimizes greening on potatoes that may have been forming near the surface. It also helps keep the soil cooler in the heat of summer. 

Plant a Late Potato Crop for Storage

  If you just grow a few potatoes for fresh eating, you can plant them in early spring. Many folks choose St. Patrick’s Day as the traditional spring planting day. However, if you want good storage potatoes, planting some late potatoes is a good idea. We usually plant a second batch in June. These late potatoes may have a lower yield but store better for winter eating. 

Harvest, Cure, and Store Potatoes Properly  

You can gently harvest a few fresh potatoes about 2 to 3 weeks after the plants flower. However, your main harvest should come 2 to 3 weeks after the plants have died back completely. This ensures they will keep well. Then, potatoes must be adequately cured before they can go into storage.  

Visit our Harvesting and Curing Potatoes post for the full process.

There are many wonderful potato varieties available for the home garden, from tried-and-true favorites like Yukon Gold to newer varieties like the beautiful Adirondack Blue. These potatoes make excellent, productive staple crops, especially if you give them a little care. Follow these seven tips for growing potatoes to have a successful harvest this season.

Garden Advice, Seed Saving

Growing Guide: Ground Cherries

December 18, 2023 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

You’ve probably grown tomatoes and maybe even tomatillos, but their lesser-known relative, the ground cherry, deserves a spot in your Solanaceae (nightshade family) lineup. Ground cherries have a more sweet, fruity flavor, hence the name ground cherry. They’re well suited to sweeter, dessert-type recipes than their relatives and are tasty fresh, too!

Ground Cherry History

Ground cherries are native to South and Central America and may have originated in Brazil before spreading to Peru and Chile. They were one of the many crops cultivated by indigenous peoples in the Americas before European contact, and Europeans brought them to England in 1774.

English colonists brought them to the Cape of Good Hope, earning them one of their other common names, the Cape Gooseberry. As colonists traveled with them, the plants made their way back to North America.

While ground cherries were popular with small farmers, they were never commercialized, probably due to their ripening and harvest, which we’ll get into in a bit. Today, they remain popular among specific communities like the Pennsylvania Dutch, who grow them for jams and preserves.

Starting Ground Cherry Seeds

Growing ground cherries is a lot like growing tomatoes! Start your seeds indoors about 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost. Plant the seeds about 1/4 inch deep, and for good germination, maintain a soil temperature between 75 and 85 degrees F.

Ground cherries typically take 7 to 10 days to germinate.

Transplanting Ground Cherries

Ground Cherries should be transplanted out after all danger of frost has passed. Harden off your transplants for a couple of weeks before planting.

Transplant them into a bed that has rich, well-drained, light soil. You may need to amend the bed with compost, as ground cherries are heavy feeders. You should also select a bed that receives full sun.

Rotate Your Ground Cherries

Rotating your crops is essential, and ground cherries are no exception. We like to rotate crops by family. Ground cherries are a member of the Solanaceae family, like tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, eggplants, and potatoes, so we avoid planting them in beds where any of these crops have grown in the last couple of years.

One of our customer favorites, Cossack Pineapple Ground Cherries

Ground Cherry Spacing

Unlike tomatoes and tomatillos, ground cherries don’t require trellising or cages. However, they still need proper spacing. Ground cherries have a sprawling, spreading growth form, so you should place them 2 to 4 feet apart. In some varieties, like Mary’s Niagara Ground Cherry, plants can surpass 6 feet wide in good growing conditions.

Ground Cherry Care

Keep your ground cherries weeded and water consistently. Keep the soil moist but not soggy. After the soil temperature has risen in June, mulching around plants is a good idea. It will help with weeding and prevent the fruits from getting dirty or rotting as quickly around harvest time.

Harvesting Ground Cherries

Ground cherries are edible and tasty when fully ripe and yellow, and their husk is brown and dry. Usually, this also means the cherries have fallen off the plant and are lying on the ground. Collect your fallen cherries and remove the husks before eating.

This habit of dropping ripe fruit is one of the reasons ground cherries have never seen widespread commercial interest.

Using Ground Cherries

Ground cherries can be eaten fresh, cooked, or preserved for later. Ground cherries also have a good shelf life and can be kept fresh for weeks before processing. Here are a few of our favorite recipes we’ve found for ground cherries:

Preserve your ground cherries for later with Grandma Ott’s Ground Cherry Jam from Seed Savers.

Make breakfast special with this 10-Minute Ground Cherry Coffee Cake from The Kitchn.

Try this Ground Cherry Tart from The Forager Chef for a simple dessert that really lets the ground cherry flavor shine through.

Try a more savory approach with this recipe from Ground Cherry Salsa from Health Starts in the Kitchen.

Turn your ground cherries into moist and delicious cake with this Coley Cooks recipe for Ground Cherry Torte.

Saving Ground Cherry Seed

You may not have to save seeds, as ground cherries have a strong tendency to self-sow. However, if you’d like to steward a variety, we recommend separating varieties by 300 feet for pure seed. You only need one plant to save viable seeds, but if you want to maintain a variety over many generations, save seeds from between 5 and 20 plants.

Processing and saving the seeds is exactly like processing tomato seeds. Squeeze the seeds and pulp into a jar, add about as much water, and let the mixture ferment for 2 to 3 days, stirring once a day. A little mold growth on top is fine.

After fermenting, add more water so that the pulp and non-viable seeds float to the surface and pour them off. You may need to repeat this a couple of times. Then, rinse your good seeds in a mesh strainer or cheesecloth with clean water.

Let your seeds dry out of direct sunlight for three weeks. Then, store them in an airtight container out of the sun.

Garden Advice

Choose the Right Lettuce Type for Your Garden

June 6, 2023 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Lettuce is excellent for beginner gardens, seed savers, and succession planting. Even if you didn’t have a great spring lettuce crop, you can sow another for fall. If you’ve been browsing lettuce on the catalog or website, you may have noticed that there are an almost overwhelming number of varieties divided into a few different categories. Below we’ll cover the different types of lettuce and how to select the best one for your garden.

Lettuce Types

Romaine (Cos) Lettuce

Even if you’re new to gardening, you’re probably familiar with romaine lettuce from your local grocery store. It produces upright, elongated tall heads with thick succulent ribs and distinctively flavored long, thick crinkled leaves. In most stores, you’ll see green Romaine, but you’ll find seeds in other colors, like the red heirloom Rouge d’Hiver (Red Winter) Romaine Lettuce or the deeply blotched Mayan Jaguar Romaine.

Romaine is the most nutritious type of lettuce you can grow. It does best in loose, fertile soil and is moderately tolerant of heat and shade. Some varieties, like Jericho, an Israeli variety bred for the desert heat, are a favorite among market growers for their heat and to-burn resistance.

Loose-Leaf Lettuce

You may have also spotted loose-leaf in stores, probably in baby lettuce mixes. As the name suggests, it’s a non-heading type of lettuce. Like Romaine, there’s so much more than you’ll find in store. Loose-leaf lettuce contains the largest diversity of attractive heirlooms.

Loose-leaf is second to Romaine in nutritional value. It’s great for home gardeners because it does well as a cut-and-come-again type and allows you to harvest only as much as you need at once. However, it doesn’t keep in the fridge as well as Romaine. Loose-leaf is also the most forgiving of poor soil and is generally more heat-tolerant than other types.

Bibb (Butterhead) Lettuce

Bibb or butterhead lettuce has small, loose green heads, blanched yellow interiors, and thin, soft-textured leaves. It has a wonderfully almost-buttery, sweet taste. The small heads are a great size for single people and smaller families.

Bibb has intermediate nutritional value. It’s generally more tolerant of hot weather than crisphead lettuce. As a group, it is best for cooler regions, with some notable exceptions.

*There’s also Buttercos lettuce which has the characteristics of both butterhead and cos.

Crisphead & Batavian Lettuce

You’re undoubtedly familiar with one common type of crisphead lettuce you’ll find at nearly any grocery store, Iceberg. Like Iceberg, other crisphead lettuce varieties are popular for their tightly folded, blanched crisp leaves.

Crisphead is less nutritious than other varieties. Because it is harder to grow to perfection, we offer varieties that are more adapted for hot regions. Crisphead lettuce should be set out early in the season since it requires a long cool season. Shading with cheesecloth or screening is recommended if heads have not formed by late spring.

Common Questions About Growing Lettuce

How Do You Keep Lettuce Going in Summer?

While some varieties are more heat tolerant than others, lettuce is a cool-season crop. You can extend your season into hotter weather in a couple of ways. The first is to cover your plantings with a reemay blanket.

The other is to plant tall vegetables in north-south rows and plant heat-resistant lettuce underneath the leaf canopy so that it is shaded during the hottest portion of the day. Corn planted in rows 4 feet apart or pole beans on a fence or trellis is ideal. Interplanting lettuce with bush squash also gives good results. Mulch the lettuce well, keep it well watered, and enjoy!

How to Start Lettuce in Hot Weather?

If the temperature exceeds 80 degrees F, lettuce will often fail to germinate. You can plant lettuce during late summer or early fall while the days are still hot, provided the seeds are germinated in the refrigerator for 4-6 days. Another method is to soak the seed in 10% bleach for 2 hours at 40-60 degrees F, followed by four water rinses. This method enhances both the speed and amount of germination.

One more method is to keep the soil cool with burlap or boards; remove cover promptly after germination to keep grasshoppers and other pests from enjoying the shaded tender sprouts!

What’s the Best Type for Beginners?

Generally, we recommend loose-leaf types for beginners as they tend to be the most forgiving of various conditions, including heat and poor soil. They also grow quickly, helping you get harvests faster and more frequently. You could also try Romaine lettuce if you have good, loose, fertile soil.

What’s the Best Type for Greenhouses?

We recommend using heat-tolerant varieties of heat-tolerant, loose-leaf, or Bibb types for greenhouses.

How Do I Save Seed From My Lettuce?

To save seed, you should isolate varieties by a minimum of 12’ for home use. For pure seed isolate varieties a minimum of 25-50’.

Lettuce will eventually bolt, especially in hot weather, sending up a tall flower stem. The flowers look a bit like mini, yellow dandelions. The flowers will eventually become fluffy and dry, and it will be time to harvest seed.

Gently bend the flower stem into a paper bag or container and give it a good shake. Any mature seeds should drop into the bag. You may need to try this for several days as the seeds slowly mature.

After collecting your seeds, you can winnow out the chaff or unwanted plant material. You can use a fan, and a couple of dishes, pouring the seed from one dish to the other as the wind blows the lighter, unwanted material away. Avoid getting too close to the fan, as lettuce seed is quite light.

There’s a lot more to lettuce than you’ll find on the grocery store shelves. Romaine, loose-leaf, Bibb, and crisphead lettuce types all have their pros and cons. Find a tasty, beautiful heirloom variety that fits well in your garden!

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange