A successful potato crop will keep you stocked up with freshly grown potatoes for as long as eight weeks, from the time the plant flowers. The first potatoes you can harvest will be little, baby potatoes – normally referred to as "new potatoes". This could be as early as six weeks after planting; be guided by ...
Archive for 2011
How Potatoes Grow, Step-by-Step
If you have never grown potatoes before, it is a good idea to familiarise yourself with the growing process of tubers, so that you can take appropriate and progressive action to ensure a successful crop. While stems, leaves and flowers do form above the ground, it is the expanding section of the plant – the tuber ...
Growing and Cooking the Best Mashed Potatoes
Potatoes are a staple and potentially delicious food, although a large number of people are surprisingly unimaginative and uninventive when it comes to cooking processes. Mashed potato is a perfect example of a dish that may be totally mundane, or marvellously cordon bleu! At its most mundane, mashed potato is made by boiling the tuber and then ...
Grow Different Coloured Potatoes
Many people think of potatoes as being dull-looking, brown-skinned vegetables that you can bake, boil or fry. But not only are there numerous ways to cook the common potato, there are also a multitude of different types of potato – more than 5,000 varieties in all. Perhaps even more surprisingly, potatoes come in a myriad ...
Have Fun with Potato Stamp Art
Potatoes are not just a versatile and nutritious food, they can also be used to print fabric and other materials. While most children have a lot of fun making and then using potato stamps, creative adults can achieve lovely patterned effects easily, quickly and very cheaply. Fabric Painting and Stamp Art Fabric painting has been practiced since ...
Helpful Hints for Cooking Potatoes
There are many different ways to cook potatoes, ranging from straightforward boiling, baking, roasting and frying, to some rather elaborate recipes that call for a host of other ingredients to be added to the potato. These helpful hints relate to some of the most basic methods of cooking potatoes successfully. Ten Top Tips for Cooking Potatoes When ...
Growing Healthy Potatoes
There is nothing much that beats harvesting a good, healthy crop of potatoes, particularly if you have grown them yourself. While there are many ways to cook potatoes, good healthy home-grown potatoes need nothing more than a rinse before they are cooked. Boiled or baked in the skin, and topped with a knob of butter or ...
Structure of the Potato
Understanding how a potato is made – or structured – is not only interesting, but it also explains how we are able to reproduce potato plants from the tubers themselves. While true potato seed comes from the berries that form in the foliage of potato plants, this type of seed forms fewer and smaller tubers than ...
Potatoes are a Cleaning Crop
In some parts of the world, particularly Europe, potatoes are considered to be a cleaning crop. This is something to take into account, particularly when it comes to crop rotation, and in gardens where weeds are a problem. Of course whatever veggies you are planning to grow, it is vital to prepare the ground well ...