Ah, potatoes are one of mother nature’s most exquisite (not to mention versatile) gifts.
Boiled, mashed, roasted, sautéed… no matter how they’re prepared they’re delicious, and guess what; they’re remarkably easy to grow too — Hooray!
As long as you plant the right varieties during the right season, you can have fresh, home-grown spuds in your kitchen year-round, as each plant produces not just one, but multiple potatoes.
How many potatoes you’ll harvest from each plant specifically depends on a few different factors, but generally speaking, you can expect to reap between 5 and 10 for every seed you plant and successfully cultivate.
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Variables That Affect Potato Yield Per Plant
If you want to maximize your potato yield so you never have to spend a dime on these awesome vegetables again, you’ll take the following factors into account.
Care
Without proper care, you’ll be lucky to get a single potato out of each of your plants.
This includes finding them a suitable grow spot, watering them regularly, especially during hot spells, and “earthing them up” whenever necessary (more on that later).
Breed
Different breeds of potato plant typically fall into low, medium, and high-yield categories, so if you’re prioritizing sheer quantity, you’ll need to be very selective with the seeds you pick up and plant in your garden.
Climate
Climate is of course out of our green hands, but there are things we can do to limit the impact of extreme weather, such as providing shelter or extra water.
Potato Yield In Lbs
It’s hard to say how many lbs of potatoes you’ll yield per plant, but generally speaking, 2 lbs of seed equates to roughly 50 lbs of potatoes; however, as mentioned earlier, this is dependent on a few different variables (curious about how many tomatoes you can yield? Read here).
A well looked after potato plant will typically give you a minimum of 3–6 nice sized potatoes and perhaps a couple of smaller specimens.
How To Optimize Potato Yield?
There are a number of measures you can take to make sure all your potato plants reach their full potential.
- Earthing up — Earthing up means to cover the developing shoots of a potato plant in earth to ensure they grow into tubers rather than inedible green appendages.
- Plant in hills — Planting your potato seeds in hills stabilizes the roots, increases soil temperature, and improves drainage. The taller the hill, the more significant the benefits.
You can create your own hills of earth for the sole purpose of cultivating super productive potato plants, an act known as, you’ve guessed it… hilling. You’ll still have to earth up your plants as the shoots emerge, though.
- Provide climate-related relief — Potato plants hate extreme weather. Too much rain can saturate their soil, too much heat can dry out their soil, and the cold can stunt growth.
What’s more, rain and wind can erode their hills, exposing their shoots and inhibiting the growth of tubers, meaning you’ll get fewer potatoes overall.
So, if you’ve got a lot of rain or wind forecast, shelter will do your potato plants a lot of good, and if a hot spell’s on the cards, lots of extra watering is a no-brainer.
You may also want to add some mulch to their hills, as this can help retain moisture for a bit longer, meaning all your thirsty little potato offspring get the water they need to thrive.
- Keep weeds at bay — Potato plants hate sharing their space with weeds. They like to hog all the nutrients in the soil for themselves, so it’s imperative you de-weed whenever you see any green invaders poking through the earth.
- Use an appropriate fertilizer — Potato plants prefer a 5-10-10 fertilizer.
- Grow companion plants — Companion plants are any plant life that benefits those around them. Potato plants have lots of leafy friends, including corn, cabbage, beans, and eggplant, all of which can help keep pests at bay.
What Will Decrease Your Potato Yield?
We gardeners are always up against a number of opponents when we take to the yard and sew our seeds.
Cultivation is a constant battle, and growing potatoes is no exception, so let’s take a look at some of the usual suspects we need to protect our potato plants from in order to optimize our yields.
Pests
It’s not just us humans that think potatoes are delicious.
Bugs such as aphids, leaf hoppers, and beetles love nothing more than chowing down on our vulnerable plants, which, needless to say, can scupper our efforts to bolster the yield when harvesting time comes around.
As mentioned a moment ago, companion plants are a great way to fend off pests, and beer traps are a solid slug deterrent (if you’re willing to give up your beer that is). I’d also recommend manually shaking bugs off in the morning.
Disease
As is documented all too well in history, potato plants are susceptible to disease, and once one plant is infected, it can spread like wildfire, even taking out your whole crop if you don’t intervene.
Diseases like blight and scab are the most prevalent, but you can minimize risk of infection by rotating crops frequently, planting seeds in breezy spots that get plenty of sunlight, and maintaining plenty of space between each plant (to see more about whether or not you can eat produce with blight, read here)..
You should also monitor your plants at least every other day in order to catch signs of infection quickly. Any infected potato plants need to be removed from the row immediately to keep your others safe.
Weeds
Weeds are born scrappers. These tough SOBs assert themselves in a space by growing quickly and stealing all the nutrients in the soil, leaving any other plants in close proximity incapable of maintaining their health.
Will weeds kill your potato plants, probably not, but without the nutrients these invaders take for themselves, your plants aren’t going to have the energy to produce a lot of potatoes.
Final Thoughts
Pay mind to the seasons and take care of your potato plants, and you could have a life-long supply of free potatoes, grown by your very own hand, and we all know that stuff tastes better when you grow it yourself!
Further Recommendations:
- When to plant Strawberries in Seattle
- Golden Kiwi vs Green Kiwi – which is the best?
- The ultimate guide to growing Serrano Peppers in pots
- How to grow mushrooms in Georgia
- When are beets in season?
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