Growing Potatoes: What You Need to Know

By The Mother Earth News Editors
Published on January 1, 1987
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by AdobeStock/yatcenko

Learn everything you need to know about growing potatoes, including when to plant potatoes, how to plant potatoes and common potato pests. MOTHER’S vegetable garden shares the history and horticulture of how to grow potatoes: nutritious, versatile, far from fattening, and easy to grow.

Growing Potatoes: the Basics

There’s nothing small potatoes about the potato. It’s the most eaten vegetable in the Western world and the fourth largest food crop–after wheat, rice, and corn–on earth. Nutritionally, it yields more sustenance on less land in less time than any major staple. The potato’s protein rates are higher in quality than the soybean’s. Just one medium-sized spud contains about half the daily adult requirement of vitamin C, as well as significant quantities of carbohydrates, calcium, protein, A and B vitamins, potassium, phosphorus, and iron–yet it’s 99.9% fat-free and has only about 100 calories.

Horticulturally, the potato is a botanic blueblood with a lineage longer than any aristocratic Homo sapiens. Nomadic Indians were gathering wild potatoes from the central Andes plateau, where the vegetable originated, before 6000 B.C. Archaeologists have found dried cultivated spuds and pottery decorated with potato motifs in Incan burial mounds dating to the second century. The potato was considered a spirit by the Incas. Some tribes even expressed time in units based on the potato’s cooking time.

When sixteenth-century Spanish explorers brought the tuber back from their conquests, the spud enjoyed a short life as the most highfalutin vegetable in Europe. It was even thought to possess exotic powers–not the least as an aphrodisiac. Naturally, word got around. English noblemen paid upwards of 250 pounds (money) for one pound (potatoes).

But the vegetable’s uppity status lasted only as long as its novelty. By the 1800s, the spud had lost favor with the rich and was a staple among Western Europe’s peasants. Because of its nutritional wallop, the potato is credited with turning the tide of nineteenth-century Europe’s horrific death rate–and with fostering a population boom that made possible the Industrial Revolution. Deaths from scurvy, rickets, and other malnutrition-related diseases dropped sharply as potatoes supplanted wheat and rye in European diets. By growing the tuber instead of grain (which required at least twice the space to produce the same amount of food), peasants with little land could support larger families. In Ireland alone, where the potato became an economic cornerstone, the population soared to over 8 million by 1845–more than twice the present number–with a density greater than today’s China.

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