Potatoes

Select Your Climate

Learn more about climate zones

If your garden is small or drainage is poor, you can grow potatoes in 45-litre pots or planter bags on a patio or balcony.

Likes: Compost enriched loam soil, pH 6-6.5

Dislikes: Frost.

When to plant/sow in a warm temperate zone: Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec

How to start: Plant certified disease-free seed potatoes. Place them in trenches 20cm-deep at 50cm intervals and cover with soil.

How to grow: Keep moist and ‘hill up' soil around base of developing plants to avoid exposing tubers to sunlight, which turns them green (green potatoes are poisonous).

When to harvest: When the stems collapse and the foliage withers.

Pests and diseases: Root-knot nematodes, leaf-eating lady beetles

Suppliers: The Diggers Club Garden Express

Bottles tomatoes all ready to be put aside for winter.

Preserving & fermented

Storing harvests for winter

Linda Cockburn writes about different ways to preserve your summer harvests, such as tomatoes, so you can keep on enjoying the results of all your hard work in winter.

Recipes

Mushroom and potato tarts

Light the fire, snuggle in and enjoy some slow cooking with this yummy recipe by Valli Little from the ABC delicious. mini cookbook series Slow.

Organic solutions

Hilling potatoes

Want to know the secret to getting maximum yeilds from your potato crop? JUSTIN RUSELL has the solution.

Recipes

Broccoli and Potato Soup

Broccoli can be anything but boring. Just ask PHIL DUDMAN and JULIE RAY who have found creative ways of turning this winter staple into a tasty treat that even the kids will love.

Vegetables

Go kumara go

If you struggle to grow decent crop of spuds in the summer then why don’t you try sweet potato, says PHIL DUDMAN, and now is the time to get planting.

Pests & diseases

Miracle Molasses

Molasses makes a handy addition to any gardener’s pest control kit. You can use it to manage chewing pests like caterpillars as well as root knot nematodes. PHIL DUDMAN describes how.