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A staple crop for our “homestead”, potatoes are something we love growing. But it’s taken many years of trial and error to find varieties that grow well for us and that store well. We spent the past 3 seasons growing out a large variety of yellow fleshed and russet style, and have come to consensus on which potatoes are our favorites. But this post is all about how to grow them, so let’s dig in.

Seasonality and Timing

Potatoes, like many foods we eat, have seasons within seasons. There are early potatoes, mid season potatoes, and late season potatoes. You can grow a few of each and enjoy a succession of potatoes all summer long, or focus on storage potatoes for winter consumption, or stagger plantings a bit and use some in late summer while still yielding plenty for winter enjoyment.

I take a bit of an unconventional approach to potatoes in that I plant them ALL on the same day and generally don’t harvest them until right around my first fall frost. We do pull off some plants, inevitably, for dinners, starting in late July through the end of the season. However, I tend to do that with plants that have died back early (which I often attribute to disease and also means they aren’t actively growing more spuds so why not eat them now, right?).

We grow mostly mid- and late season potatoes here, so it makes a lot of sense to just let them ride it out and cure in the ground before lifting them.

Site Prep

Well-amended and well draining soil, ideally free of large rocks that will impede burgeoning tubers will yield the best crop. Potatoes like it slightly acidic too, just under a neutral pH. If you don’t know your soil’s pH, consider getting your soil texted at your local extension agency.

Chitting

Ever wondered what this business was all about? Chitting is the simple process of pre-sprouting tubers to speed up the germination process. It’s particularly useful if you suffer from wet soils in spring where the tubers might be prone to rotting, and is purported to hasten your yield by up to 2 weeks!

Apparently, in the US it’s called “greensprouting”. Who knew? Certainly not me. This is a common British tactic, perhaps popular to their very maritime, rainy weather which might result in rot before sprouting otherwise. I’ve never been impeded by soggy spring rains for potato sprouting here. If you live with really saturated soils in spring, chitting might be something you should consider.

Johnny’s Seeds has a nice write up about it here.

Planting and Plant Spacing

Potatoes, like garlic and sweet potatoes and dahlia tubers and heck, even apple and other fruit varieties, are grown from clones. We use our saved potatoes from the previous season, as we do our garlic, to plant the next year’s crop. I select small to mid-sized potatoes (because we often have a large surplus in spring) for planting. I generally do not cut my seed potatoes in half, because excess. If you need to, and with ordered seed potatoes you might, you can cut a potato up into about a golf ball (1-1 1/2” size ball) and plant those. They are ideally cut the day before you plant and should have several eyes on them.

The more space you give later maturing potatoes, the better yields you’ll likely have. I should take this advice myself, and maybe I will this year. I tend to plant my potatoes about 9” apart and 30” between rows. It’s recommended you give potatoes anywhere between 12-18” between plants for highest yields. The larger the seed potato, the further apart you should plant them. Perhaps we plant fewer spuds but further apart and still yield a ridiculous bounty of produce.

I dig a 6-8” deep trench and fertilize the entire trench generously (about 1/4 cup for each 12” section). Trenches run parallel to our garden beds. I set a tape measure in the bed and place a potato every 12” (we’re pretending I’m doing it right and so you will too!). I gently replace some of the mounded soil to the trench and water regularly. I will continue to add more soil as the plants grow (more on this in a minute).

Because I don’t chit (pre-sprout) my potatoes, they usually take a few weeks to sprout. Some varieties naturally wake up sooner but we usually get 100% “germination”.

You can plant seed potatoes several weeks before your last frost — if they sprout and get hit by a late frost, they will re-sprout but if it happens many times, your overall yield will likely be negatively impacted.

Hilling

Hilling potatoes does a few things. First, it helps the plants grow strong roots. The first time you hill, you will pretty much bury the plant excepting the top few sets of leaves, just like you might bury your stout tomato seedling upon planting so it, too, will put out new roots along its stem.

As the plants grow taller (if planted in early May by early July they should look gorgeous), I continue to add soil back to the trench, eventually starting to mound around the base of the plants to help protect any shallow tubers that develop from being exposed to sunlight which turns them green and concentrates solanines which can be harmful (cut out any green skin before cooking with them).

The second and final hilling, which is when you end up mounding it, could be done with straw or leaf mulch too. This method might work better for weed suppression and to disrupt the thorny but sluggish Colorado potato beetle. We usually just rely on our soft and pillowy top few inches of compost to do the trick.

Fertilization

Unsurprisingly, this heavy producer loves a lot of fertilizer and well-draining soils. We rely on our fall topping of compost to prepare our beds, and then fertilize only once, at transplanting. If your soil seems to be lacking nutrition, doing a fish emulsion foliar feeding is a common practice for potatoes about once a month during the growing season. Be sure to apply on a dry evening or early morning so as to not burn the foliage.

Disease Pressure

Colorado potato beetle and early blight are two diseases we’ve faced with potatoes over the year. For blights and other fungal diseases, it seems to be correlated to certain varieties. For example, we no longer grow Yukon Golds here, despite their prominence in the grocery store because they seem excessively disease prone. We’ve replaced them with Baltic Rose and Huckleberry Gold, two great yellow potato alternatives.

These are Colorado potato beetle larvae (olrder larval stages) and their disgusting frass. They are easily removed into a soapy pail of water.

Colorado potato beetles, like Japanese beetles, overwinter in the soil and emerge in late Spring. Their one redeeming quality is that they are sloth-like. Despite flying they don’t fly away or pee on you when you grab them. Their eggs are easy to spot on the underside of leaves (unlike Japanese beetles, come to think of it, where the heck do they lay those eggs?), and their many larval stages are equally easy to spot, catch, and plunk into a pail of soapy water.

A consistent, daily effort to control them will go a LONG way for future seasons. We got behind on them in 2021, the year my dad was dying of cancer, and 2022 was brutal but we did daily beetle pickings and 2023 was much mellower.

Harvesting

As I’ve alluded to, I prefer to leave my mature potatoes in the beds until pretty late in the season. I’ll even wait until after our first (light) frost to harvest our potatoes. A light frost won’t damage potatoes that are growing under the soil. It’s never been an issue for me. But colder air, say below 27, I’d probably be rushing to pull them out. Potatoes — the actual tubers — cannot withstand a frost.

To harvest, use a spade and dig a deep hole around the outside perimeter of the foliage. Some potatoes will be harmed in this process. You’ll separate them out and eat them first. As expert of a gardener as I am, I spear more than half a dozen potatoes annually during harvest season.

Ideally, your foliage dies back and you wait several weeks before harvesting. If you’re nearing your first frost and they are still green, you might want to cut the foliage down to tell the tubers to toughen up (this is akin to topping tomatoes, I’d say).

The advantage to waiting to harvest is that this gives the tubers lots of time to harden their skin. Potatoes that are harvested early have more tender skin. Think a new potato: super enjoyable to work with in the kitchen but not strong enough to sit around for 6 months waiting for the turn under the santuko knife.

Storing

Potatoes do best in cool temperatures (35-50F) and high humidity (>90%). They are one of our staple crops for our damp root cellar, and fared relatively well this season even with the warmer temperatures overall in the damp root cellar. Now that it’s mid-April, this is usually the time when I take the remaining potatoe and put them into our basement refrigerator (not a great place for longterm storage because it’s not humid enough).

But you don’t need a damp root cellar in order to store them. Here is what the root cellar is doing: it’s dark, so there’s no sunlight to spark greening of the skin. It’s cool, which is another signal that it’s not time to grow. And it’s damp, so that they hold their water content.

You can try and use a cooler corner of your basement or garage for this (garage only in warmer climates). Use a bin or box and layer them with newspaper. Be sure there’s airflow too. Check on them often to be sure they are storing well. Some people will take older fridges and add a bucket of water inside them to increase the humidity and it can act like a damp root cellar.

There are numerous ways to try and store potatoes without a root cellar, though I do believe it takes a lot of the guesswork out of it. If you’ve stored potatoes in your basement or some other corner of your home, please comment and let us know your tricks!

A staple year round for us, I’m penning this grow guide to help you grow your best carrots yet.

Carrots are a tamed version of a well-known roadside weed (here in North America): Queen Anne’s Lace. Both in the Apiaceae family, along with fennel, dill, parsley, lovage, celery, and more. Carrots have umbelliferous blooms covered with a mass of with white flowers that often attract predatory wasps, hover flies, and other beneficial insects.

A biennial like cabbage and onions, carrots don’t flower (usually) until the second year. Inevitably, one or a handful of my summer carrots will decide to bolt. I usually pull them out because we grow plenty of flowers for pollinators. All this to say, carrots are consumed for their nutrient dense roots, the very energy that would be used for seed production. This knowledge always makes me extra grateful. Grateful for the seed producers, the seed tenders, and those that first started to cultivate wild carrots into what we all love today.

Timing, Seasonality & Square Footage Needs

Once you get familiar with their germination needs, they often, for most many zones (conservatively zone 6 and cooler), be a solid 3 or 4 season crop. You just need to get them germinated early and often.

I can direct seed carrots from April until late July here. I’ve tried in August and can grow some pretty small baby carrots with a fast variety like Mokum, but not larger storage carrots which take an extra few weeks.

Lately, my first sowing is on April 1, without any cover. I just prep the soil and get them set up, and hope for some spring rains because it’s always before our irrigation is back on.

My April sowing ends up being a June through August steady summer harvest. Even though they are all ripe by early July, I simply let them sit in the garden and harvest as needed. Last spring I sowed a 4×6 area with carrots, 30 linear feet (5 rows of carrots across the 6’ long stretch of the bed). I’ll be honest: it was probably a little too much, so I’m dialed our first planting back to about half that in 2024 and it was plenty of fresh carrots for the growing season. Then I sow more carrots around the 4th of July for our big fall harvest / root cellar.

For overwinter eating, we usually sow about a 4×12 bed of carrots. This is the equivalent of 60 row feet (linear feet) of carrots. We are still eating a LOT of carrots as I write this, and not all carrots store equally, which leads me right into my next topic.

Varieties

There are numerous carrot varieties out there. Plenty of open pollinated varieties and lots of hybrids, sort of like tomatoes and peppers. I grow just a few open pollinated varieties, but honestly our best keepers for winter continue to be hybrid varieties like Bolero. Many carrots sprouted even by January in our not-so-cold root cellar (zero gratitude for the extra hot winter, which has been hard on our passively cooled damp root cellar). Caught early enough, they are still edible but it’s not ideal.

Atlas, Charentay, Nantes, Purple Haze and probably Bolero carrots (left to right).

We’ve tried pink carrots and other purple varieties, but we really love the extra sweetness orange carrots provide. Interestingly, orange carrots are highest in Vitamin A, more so than any other carrot color, making them the most nutrient dense carrot.

My favorite varieties are:

• Mokum F1 for early spring and summer harvests
• Purple Haze for fresh summer eating (short term storage is ok too)
• Bolero F1 for winter storage
• Danvers 126 for short term storage and potentially massive carrots!
• Chantenay a tapered shape that performs pretty well in heavy soils
• Atlas (Parisian) for clay soils or container gardening (round carrots, kinda novel but hard to peel)

Site Prep

Before planting, it’s important to be sure your soil is well amended and pitchforked. Carrot root tips are very fine and any obstacle will result in a hard right or left, that you will later unearth as a disappointing, albeit entertaining, forked or twisted root.

I use a pitchfork and sink it all the way in and pull back several inches, repeating every few inches around my planting area, hopefully, without puncturing our irrigation lines that are slightly buried. There’s no need to turn the soil over or dig it up, not even after you’ve just harvested something (unless there are large root balls from previous crop, then digging those out would be beneficial, such as large cabbage or broccoli roots from a spring planting, which is often where my fall carrots go.

If you have really heavy clay or rocky New England soil, I’d recommend starting with the Atlas carrot. All that carrot flavor packed into the top 2” of soil, your best shot at growing carrots in challenging conditions.

Sowing Tips

Probably the hardest part of growing carrots is getting the seeds to germinate. Even and constant moisture — not to be confused with super saturated soils — is paramount. Irrigation is also key for growing good carrots. Deep, consistent watering throughout the life cycle.

Seeds should be lightly covered with soil, too — aim for a planting depth of 1/4”. I sow seeds as thinly as possible so less thinning is needed later, but it still inevitably ends up being a densely planted area. If you have the patience to aim for a seed every 1/2” that would give you room to play as germination rates may vary.

Row spacing should be about 8-12” apart. Seed packets might say more, but I’ve been growing them more densely for many years now without any diminishing returns.

Soil temperatures should be at least 50F before sowing seeds, otherwise you can expect even slower germination rates.

Place a piece of burlap over the seeded area and water well, fully soaking the burlap. Repeat 1-2 times a day depending on cloud cover, temperatures, and season. This is a fair bit easier in the early season as the soil tends to retain moisture for longer in spring (when it rains, that is).

I’ve had carrot seeds germinate in 8 days in summer, which blew my mind last year. Normally, they will take closer to 14 days, even in summer. In the early season, they can take up to 3 weeks. Patience and moisture are keys to success.

Thinning/Plant Spacing

The second most important thing for carrot success is to thin the seedlings out. They are tiny, grass-like cotyledons, and it’s hard to tell the apart. I often wait a little while before thinning, but I always thin from the base of the plants. One stem = one carrot.

Stems that are too close together will be competing for nutrients and sunlight. Even as seedlings, they may grow a bit leggy on you.

By about 3 weeks after germination, you can start to thin. I thin over a few different times. The first time is to get to about 1/2” between plants.

The next thinning usually doesn’t happen until we have baby carrots ready to harvest, so another month to six weeks, depending on the varieties (Mokum works great for this strategy, by the way.)

My end goal is 1 plant every inch and rows, as mentioned, about 8-12” apart. This means 4-5 rows running parallel in the 4’ wide raised bed.

If weed pressure is high for you, beware that carrots are a low-growing crop and thus susceptible to weed pressure. I’d aim to weed every time you thin (at least 2 times in that first 6 weeks), and then again as needed as they reach their mature height of around 12” tall.

Fertilization

I amend the bed with slow release organic fertilizer at planting time and that’s it. No more fertilizing needed for carrots here. Our soil is rich with compost, too, and holds water well but not excessively so it’s a nearly-perfect growing medium for carrots. I’d say less is

Succession Planting

Carrots are one of our most important succession planting crops here. As mentioned, I start them in early April for summer eating. That’s about 4-6 weeks before our last spring frost.

But any time from about a month before your frost through to about 10 weeks before your first fall frost is fair game for sowing. You definitely don’t need to adhere to my spring and summer sowing, it’s just what seems to work well for me in that I remember to sow them (Fourth of July is when it starts to make its way toward the top of the mental sowing list).

Harvesting and Storage

Carrots store really well in the fridge, as long as you cut the green tops off (they make a pretty tasty pesto, if you’re into that … recipe will come out early this summer!). We tend to harvest about a week’s worth, cut the green tops and store in a gallon ziploc bag. If I’m not too frantic with life, I will lightly rinse them off before storing short term, but it’s also OK to just take a dirt-clinging carrot and plunk it right into your storage container and wait to wash until you’re ready to snack or cook with it.

TIP: Limp carrots can be revived by plunging in water and putting in fridge for a little while (like how we similarly revive limp lettuce).

For super long storage, a high humidity situation is needed, like our root cellar. Or, alternatively, you can mulch and leave carrots in the ground for the winter. I did this with some that I cut the tops off of last fall. I haven’t dug them up yet, but I probably should to do a taste test between those and our root cellar ones to see if it’s worth leaving more in the ground in future years.

Here is a video I put together for one of my corporate clients two summers ago — the first 5 minutes demonstrate the prep, sowing, watering, and eventual thinning of carrots at both seedling and baby carrot stage. I think it’d be useful for the visual learners here.

Artichokes have always been more of a fascination to me, something I’d wanted to experience up close, in person, and across the seasons. And that’s why I decided to plant them last year.

Truth be told, I bought the seeds in winter 2021, then forgot to sow them in 2022, so it took an extra year to remember they were in my possession and to time it all right.

This guide should give anyone growing in a cooler zone the skills and timing they need to get ‘chokes in summer.

About Artichokes

Artichokes are thistle-like perennial native to the Mediterranean that is a domesticated version of cardoon. It’s in the Aster family, so related to flowers including zinnias, sunflowers, cosmos, and prairie plants like black-eyed susans and New England asters. It puts out massive, sometimes 3’ long, leaves that are a silvery green, deeply veined and pointy. Some varieties can be a bit thorny, a nod to their cardoon heritage.

Like most perennials, it doesn’t usually flower the first year — and that’s why it’s often tricky to grow it in cold climates, zones 7 and colder, where it’s not winter hardy.

Varieties

There are lots of artichoke varieties out there, but I am listing just a few that are well-suited to colder climates. If you’re in a warmer zone, you have more variety to choose from. Imperial Star was the first such improved artichoke for northern climates, producing ‘chokes in the first year.

• Imperial Star (OP)
• Tavor (OP)
• Green Globe Improved (OP)
• Wonder (F1) – High Mowing, patent utility variety

I’ve only grown Imperial Star, but I’d guess Tavor would produce similarly for me, given it’s an improved Imperial Star. Seeing as how most of these are open pollinated, I don’t see the need to purchase a hybrid variety, especially one that has a 20-year patent utility (read about that here).

Sowing Tips

Artichokes are cute little seedlings. They do need a good indoor head start — up to 12 weeks, but 8 is sufficient in my experience.

Sow them around the end of February in zone 3 or 4. There’s no need to sow them any sooner. I started ours on February 15 last year, and produced chokes by mid-July with some key cold exposure in the seedling stage. This year I’ll sow them in the end of February, along with my earliest flat of brassicas.

Sow seeds 1/4” deep in 2” soil blocks or the equivalent size pot. Although they need cold exposure to produce buds, they need warmth, like most everything else, to germinate, so be sure to have your seedling mat on once you sow them. They might be a little slow to germinate (over a week).

Potting Up

About 4-5 weeks after they’ve germinated, pot them up into 4” (newspaper or plastic) pots — or a pot of at least double the size they started out in. I know it’s time to pot my plants up when I am seeing a lot of roots coming out of my soil block. This will depend on a few things: how long you keep your lights on (read: how much the plants are photosynthesizing), how warm your grow space is, and how much nutrition the plants have access to. If there’s not enough light, it’s cool, or the soil lacks nutrients the plants will not grow as fast.

This should give them ample space and sufficient nutrition (be sure the soil mix has lots of compost mixed in) to get them ready for your garden bed.

I like to pot my seedlings up into a potting soil mix that is about 1/3 – 1/2 compost (pretty much for all seedlings). This eases the need to fertilize the seedlings.

Vernalization & Hardening Off

Cold vernalization is the process of exposing plants to cool temperatures to promote flowering. This sets their biological clock to think they’ve gone through winter and are now in their second year when they normally produce their crops/flower. In order for us northerners to grow artichokes as an annual, they need 10 consecutive days of cold exposure in spring before they are transplanted. This can happen anytime after germination and before transplanting, so consider your long term forecast carefully.

We were blessed last spring with a long cold stretch in both April and May. It felt too long, but once it warmed up it was summer. (Read: we sort of skipped spring.) I used those weeks in April to set my artichoke seedlings outside on the deck, protected from frost but exposed to temperatures in the 40s for a few weeks. If memory serves, I think it even was cool when I transplanted them. May was dreary and cool.

And here I thought I used newspaper pots, but clearly I used plastic pots for these seedlings!

This is exactly the kind of weather these plants require to fruit as an annual: they need to think they’ve just weathered a Mediterranean/Californian winter. Whether you get there by erecting a little tent on your deck or keeping them in your cooler garage for a 10 days or so, this is a required step to go beyond the gorgeous silvery foliage and achieve the crowning success that is an artichoke bud/flower.

Plant Spacing

If grown as a perennial, artichokes need spacing of 5’, and end up needing to be divided every few years.

As an annual, I planted ours 3’ apart with Thumbelina zinnia tucked in at the edge of the bed. It was a bit rambunctious, but I figured this isn’t like potatoes or carrots, main winter staple foods for us, so the interplanting was intentionally flower-forward.

Harvesting & Cooking

Harvesting artichokes is sort of like harvesting broccoli: you watch it grow and have to decide, is today the day it’s as large as it will get before the flower starts to separate, or can I push it one more day? And they are quite similar, both being flower buds we are consuming. You want to harvest them when they are tight heads. My biggest one was probably the size of a tennis ball.

You might get 3 or so large ones, and then, depending on the season and how much space you gave the plants, should get a few more smaller ones. Just like with broccoli, I suppose, where side shoots are smaller than the main head.

Clip the artichokes just below the flower bud, with about 1” of the stem attached.

Steam in a double boiler for about 40 minutes with some lemon juice mixed in to prevent browning. Enjoy with an aioli or butter as a dipping sauce for the petals.