Planting Potatoes in the Fall: A Seasonal Twist

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Planting potatoes in the fall instead of the spring is one of two changes I'm making this year. Weeding in November is another one. Here's why you might want to try these changes too.

First up the potatoes, about 8" under the soil in the first half of this bed. In a twist of ~~fate~~ forgetfulness, this post contains no photographs of potatoes. At all. Allow me to set the scene for you visually:

The gate on my vegetable garden is adorned with a green cleaver made from scraps of artificial grass & chicken wire. To open the gate, I lean into the post so it will sigh enough that I can pull up the latch. It swings open easily and I take my first step onto the trodden centre path, balancing a black 5 gallon pot filled with green potatoes. The interior of the pot is green as well, making it look like the potatoes are glowing green.

O.K. Have you pictured that? Now take a snapshot of me at the gate with the pot of potatoes on my hip and memorize it. That's your potato photo.

Luckily the day I went to the garden to shoot my planting potatoes in the fall photos, I took photos of swiss chard, transplanted strawberry runners and many more things that were not potatoes.

I replaced a smaller hoop house with a slightly larger one so the swiss chard leaves wouldn't be touching the row cover. If the leaves touch the row cover and the row cover gets frost on it, it will kill the chard leave. In a week or two I'll cover the hoop with plastic and then we'll see how long I can keep it alive into the winter.

A couple of transplanted runners from my Audrey strawberries.

Please enjoy the next several not potato photos ...

This is a bit more of the strawberry bed. All the soil behind the strawberries are where I have planted 120 cloves of garlic.

I also astutely took a photo of the righthand side of my weed encampment.

That is a shining example of an underdeveloped, very tiny, should have been much bigger, single sprig of eucalyptus. I'll start it earlier next year.

The dreaded kale.

Of course of all the vegetables this is the one that's living it's best life.

And also the left, neater by comparison, weed nursery.

Which brings us to the second thing I have to do now that it seems to be warmer for longer in the fall.

Weeds in the Fall

There are more of them because it's been so consistently mild and above freezing the past month that they just keep growing. So I have to keep weeding the lefthand side garden bed.

I'm afraid of the righthand side so I'll continue to ignore it.

This is how warm it has been. Below are the last 2 dahlias that I picked in the first week of November.

I left the tubers in the ground and didn't cut the stalks because these, possibly my favourites, hadn't flowered yet. AC Paint has the striking ability to be consistently surprising and always striking. Both of those flowers came from the same plant and they grew at the same time.

I really wanted to see a couple of the blooms so I just kept leaving the plant in the ground. The flower took weeks to open as much as it normally would in just a few days.

Now for the potatoes.

Planting Potatoes in the Fall

I set aside a bunch of small spuds when I harvested my potatoes this summer knowing I was going to experiment with them.

Whenever I plant potatoes, potatoes that I've missed sprout in the spring and grow a full crop of potatoes. I'll often have 5 or 6 potato plants sprout up. If they're crowding something I just keep removing the top greens until it does. If it isn't bothering anything else I just let them grow. They always develop mature tubers before the potatoes I plant myself in the spring.

This year I thought it would be ridiculous not to experiment with planting my potatoes in the fall. Madness. So that's what I did, and I just planted them the exact same way I do in the spring.

Plant the potatoes about 8" deep if you have workable soil, less than that if your soil is hard.

This time for planting I used a hand held spade to slide the potato behind but it's the same method really as the one I'm using above with a shovel.

These are bona fide spring pop up potatoes.

That's 10 potato plants that grew from what could have been whole potatoes I missed digging up or sections that were cut through when I dug them.

Why?

The warmer/dryer the climate the more less likely it is that your potatoes will rot if you overwinter them in the ground.

I realize climate change isn't linear, and this might be a bad, cold year coming up, but if I'm looking at recent past experience as an indicator then I'd say I have a pretty good shot at being able to plant my potatoes in the fall.

The Benefits

I now have 2 times a year I can plant potatoes instead of 1.
Planting at a different time might help to reduce pest (potato beetle) damage by changing the schedule of the potato growing cycle.

The Drawbacks

Fall planted potatoes will mature earlier than spring planted ones. They will mature when it's still hot out and I don't have anywhere with cool enough conditions to store them (like a root cellar) in the summer.

The garden gate requires the same ceremony to exit but when I'm leaving there's more risk. I may have entered with a pot of potatoes balanced jauntily on my hip, but leaving I'm balancing bunches of chard and kale, some scraggler carrots, a few beets, my purse and part of a hoop house between my elbows and 1 knee as I repeatedly miss the hook with the latch.

That was your final image.