The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.46: Growing Great Potatoes

Episode Date: April 16, 2015

This episode, Ruth Genger, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin in Madison Organic Potato Project, joins me to talk about the finer points of getting your potato production off to a great start. Ruth explains how to ensure your potato plants "jump out of the soil" by starting with high quality seed potatoes, and employing a few other important techniques. 

A lot of the skill I think in growing organic potatoes is understanding that there are certain pests and diseases that are going to want to suck some of the energy out of your potato crop. You can think of your potato crop as this nice juicy resource out in the field that various organisms want a piece of. So the faster you can get that through the season and into storage, the better in a lot of ways. And pre-spouting allows you to do that. This is the Ruminant Podcast, and I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a podcast and blog that wonders what good farming looks like. You can find everything at theruminant.ca. At the site, you'll find posts of every podcast episode I've done, my essays, photo-based submissions from other farmers, and all kinds of great stuff. I hope you'll check it out. All right, time for a podcast.

Hi folks. It's Wednesday, the hour is late, and I have very little time to record much of an intro for this episode. Here's what you need to know. Here's what you need to know. When I was out at Moses Organic in Wisconsin, a great conference that happens every year out there, I listened to a speaker called Ruth Jenger talk about potato production. So let's meet Ruth. My name is Ruth Jenger, and I am a researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

And I've been working with organic farmers on potato production for about the last eight years now. Mainly what I focus on is issues to do with production of healthy seed potatoes, that is the potatoes that are planted to produce the next year's crop. But we also do quite a lot of work on variety trialing, looking for varieties that are well suited to organic production. And we have initiated in the last year a breeding program aiming at breeding specialty potatoes that are suited to organic production. So I had a great conversation with Ruth, and what we focused on was all the considerations to be thinking about just before and during planting of your potatoes. So creating the conditions for

really good potato production. So we talked a lot about saving seed potatoes and also where to source them and why you should consider sourcing your seed potatoes from elsewhere, as well as all kinds of fun stuff like cutting your potatoes so that you can stretch your seed supply a little bit further and chitting them. If you don't know what chitting is, well, you'll find out. It was a really good interview and I think if you're, I think whether you've grown potatoes before or whether you're just about to start growing potatoes and whether it's on the home garden scale or really large scale i think uh there's a lot to learn in this episode so i hope you like it and i'll talk to you at the end ruth ginger thanks a lot for coming on the ruminant podcast thanks for having me ruth i'm really excited to talk to you about organic

potato production which we're going to do in just a moment. Although with my guests, I like to try and start with some lighter material, which serves A, to just a bit of an icebreaker and also just to establish your credentials so that we can prove you have the knowledge you say you do. So what I'd like to do is ask you if you know the answers to these potato jokes that I found online. So what do you say to an angry baked potato? I have no idea.

Are you really a potato researcher, Ruth? This is what I'm wondering now. The answer is anything. Just butter them up. I like that. What is a potato's least favorite dance? There's one called the mash, isn't there? That is the answer to the joke that you have just somewhat redeemed yourself, Ruth Ginger.

You have just somewhat redeemed yourself. Thank goodness. I know something. Okay. One more from this website on vegetable jokes that I found on the page for potatoes. Why did the potato cross the road? Oh, dear. I'm terrible at this.

You know what? This one isn't even fair. The answer is he saw a fork up ahead. And I think that's a – Of course, he would run in the other direction. Yeah, but see, it's terrible. It's not even a potato joke. I mean you could be like why did the beefaroni cross the road because he saw a fork up ahead.

That does not belong on this potato page. And there were more jokes including some really like lowbrow ones that I'm not – it would have you blushing. So I'm not going to tell you those. Well, i'm relieved because they're so terrible i actually made up um like a varsity level joke like something um you know more more uh just more appropriate to your level of understanding of potatoes so um i made this up like just a few minutes ago i i want to know if you know the answer and either way what you think of it. So here we go. This is the last one, Ruth, I promise.

What do you call a dishonest seed potato? What do you call a dishonest seed potato? A rotten spud? A bull chitter. All right. I approve. That's pretty good, right? That is a good potato joke.

Yeah. I'll tell you what, Ruth. Next time you're speaking at Moses in Wisconsin, you can use that. You can call it your own joke. I'm giving you my permission, but I just made that up. Well, thank you. I will write it down and keep it in my collection. All right. All right.

Awesome. Okay. So enough silliness. Ruth, I feel like the potato was seen as like just a super, super easy garden plant to grow and that people take them for granted almost when really there's a lot of important knowledge around potato production and there's a big difference between sloppy production and good production. Yeah, and I think that sometimes people who are either getting into organic farming or who maybe are experienced organic farmers that haven't grown potatoes before, sometimes they do take it for granted that it will not be a difficult crop to grow.

before, sometimes they do take it for granted that it will not be a difficult crop to grow. But once you're growing it, once you're growing more than a few plants in a garden, there are things that you really need to pay attention to. And I've actually been quite happy to hear from friends of mine who grow backyard gardens that they've started growing potatoes often because I give them some sweet potatoes in the spring. And they're delighted to see how productive they are and they really enjoy, they think the plants are beautiful and the flowers are beautiful and they really enjoy the whole process and find it very easy. So I wonder if that's why people have the perception that it won't be difficult.

But I do know that there are quite a few CSA farmers, so fairly small scale, some actually fairly large scale CSA farmers in my area who don't grow potatoes because they have had so many problems with them and they will actually do an exchange or they'll buy in potatoes from other organic farms to supplement their CSA offerings. I certainly, I'm going to confess that I haven't done well with potato production on my farm. And now partly I don't grow a ton just because I find I'm not large enough to afford the kind of harvest equipment that makes it efficient, but I'm not even talking about that. I just haven't had great yields. I've had some problems, which I think

might be late season blight that we can talk about in a little bit. But in general, I just I haven't I haven't produced great potatoes. So I'm I learned a little bit in your talk in Wisconsin. I'm hoping to learn a little bit more today. Yeah. But but anyway, yeah, I certainly think that there's there I'm I'm I'm I'm continually like lately, I've just been appreciating more and more that there's an art to growing them well. Yes, yeah, that's definitely true. And the more you know, if you can start to figure out the reasons why they haven't done so well for you,

sometimes the things that you may not be able to change very easily, like your soil conditions, but there are other things that you can, once you know to look out for them, it might be something that's quite solvable uh well you mentioned soil ruth and that's where i'd like to get started in in this um this primer on potatoes could you give could you give us um just a primer on on the kind of soil conditions people should be aiming for um you know before planting and then to set up good potato production? Well, in general, people consider a fairly sandy soil to be a good soil for growing potatoes, something that's fairly light with... You certainly don't want it to be pure sand.

I know that there are a lot of very large-scale potato-producing areas that are on pretty much pure sand. But if you're growing organically, then obviously you need to have a good amount of organic matter in the soil just to have that nutrient-holding capacity. And if you have a loamy soil, you have more of that nutrient holding capacity already. So in general, though, potatoes do like a fairly light soil. If you've got clay, it's going to be a lot more challenging. But you can certainly ameliorate that with the addition of a lot of organic material. of organic material. Often we do some fairly deep plowing to try to loosen up the soil and have a nice deep seed bed. And that definitely helps. If you have compaction in your soil,

you're going to struggle with that very much at harbors. So getting a nice, light, loose soil is really important early on. And can you talk a little bit about soil amendments, including compost and different types of compost, you know, manure-based compost versus vegetative compost, and also just other minerals people might add in an organic context to get better production? people might add in an organic context to get better production? Yeah, for sure.

So generally in the production in the field that I have my research in, we use a chicken manure compost, and that has worked very well for us. Some years we have, if we have noticed low levels of certain micronutrients, we have purchased a micronutrient mix as well. But we also work with a farmer who has been growing organic potatoes for about 15 years now on a nice light silt loam. And he grows all of his nutrition. He does a lot of cover cropping. He doesn't apply any manure. And really, I would not have believed that you could grow potatoes very well that way because they are fairly heavy feeders. But he's successful with it. He also applies some biological amendments to try to

really activate the soil microbiology. And perhaps that has something to do with it. I think that would be a really interesting research area to look into. But I do want to encourage people to think about the potential of cover crops as opposed to simply applying manure. And if they're interested in that, to maybe do some little experiments and little trials on their own farms to see how that works out for them because it's clearly possible. And so the key there just being to, you know, both before and after the main potato production in a season

to keep that soil covered in some mixture of, you know, both before and after the main potato production in a season to keep that soil covered in some mixture of, you know, a nitrogen producer and something like a rye or notes or a barley, stuff like that? Yeah, yeah, definitely. You want to, it's ideal to have a legume before you put in your potato crop, just to have that extra nitrogen credit that will go into the soil. And then a lot of the time, especially if you are growing some late maturing varieties, and especially if you're in northern latitudes, your only real option is going to be winter rye after you've harvested potatoes. But generally, that will establish pretty well and give you some nice regrowth in the spring. But yeah, definitely important to keep that soil covered. And with the cover cropping, you have a lot more potential to add organic matter into the

soil, which I consider very important with potatoes. Potatoes are hard on the soil. You're doing a lot of preparation to get that deep, loose seed bed in the spring, and then you're completely disrupting the soil structure when you go through and harvest. So it actually takes a lot of carbon out of the soil, which is true of annual agriculture in general. a lot of carbon out of the soil, which is true of annual agriculture in general. So the more we can be putting that back and just adding organic matter to the soil, the more sustainable our potato production is going to be. And just following off of that, I know in your presentation you mentioned the importance of long rotations. Yes.

So that's a good principle in any form of organic, in any agricultural production. But is it particularly important for potatoes? In potatoes, there are certain diseases that stay in the soil that can really impact the usable production that you get, the usable yield that you get from your potato crop. And because those organisms are quite long-lived in the soil, if you can extend your rotation out to about six years or longer,

if you can manage that, then that's going to allow the population of those pathogenic organisms to drop down to a level where they shouldn't give you too many problems. So one example of that is a soil bacteria which causes common scab on potatoes. And that's probably a pretty familiar disease to anyone who's growing potatoes. As you would imagine from the name, the bacteria causes large scabby lesions. They're not at all attractive. So that can really reduce your marketability of your crop. And if you go into a field for the first time with potatoes,

those potatoes will be clean as a whistle. They are just beautiful coming out of the soil. But after a few years of going back in a short rotation, you will start to see a lot more scab. Some of that may have come in on seed pieces that bacterial species, which is Streptomyces scabies, that can basically colonize the surface of the potato, they adapt to its presence and they get more common in the soil population

and that's how you develop this problem. So stretching out your rotation really helps with just keeping those soil organisms that will colonize your potato, just keeping them at a low level. Ruth, a major focus of your presentation at the conference was on the importance of healthy seeds. So I'd love to talk about that topic of healthy seed potatoes and what that means and how we achieve that,

I guess. Yeah. You started with just a basic principle, healthy seed equals healthy crops. Yeah. So maybe I'll just set you loose to start. I do have some questions, but could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, for sure. Really what I mostly think about is the absence of diseases.

And because potatoes are a vegetatively propagated crop, there is the potential for diseases to persist in the seed potatoes that you're planting. So a potato is actually, it's a modified underground stem. Most people just think of it as it's a tuber. They may not know exactly what that means in terms of the plant part, but it is a stem. And so you can kind of think of it as a cutting. If you were trying to propagate from, say, an apple tree, you might take a cutting and graft that onto a rootstock. With potatoes you're essentially taking a cutting from the previous year's crop that the plant handily you know detaches and leaves in the soil for you that's the cutting. So if the parent

plant has a disease it's very possible for that disease to be present in the tuber as well. And the parent plant may not have shown any signs of that disease even if the disease came in fairly late in the growing season. But if it's present there in your tuber, then as soon as that tuber comes up, it's being affected by the disease. And with a lot of viral pathogens that can that can stunt the plant and if you have a really high level of virus in your seed then that can even cause a crop failure. So because this is such a big issue in the potato industry there is there is a whole industry built around certifying seed potatoes for health. And those potatoes are tested, a sample is taken at harvest, and they are actually taken to the tropics. They get to have a tropical vacation over the winter and grown out so that they can be checked for evidence of

disease. So, I mean, I have the impression that you're not a big advocate of saving potato seed for the reasons you just explained. I think that it can be okay to save potato seed, but I think you really need to know what you're doing. I think that if you simply save your seed year after year, what you are setting yourself up for is a crop failure. And I'm not opposed to people saving seed by any means, because I recognize that sometimes it's an economic necessity. But what I really want is for people to grow healthy crops. And so I want them to be aware that there are some potential dangers to saving your own seed. And there are ways that they can learn to select the plants that they save seed from that will reduce those dangers.

So one example of that is to know what the common diseases are that can be passed on in seed potatoes, recognize the symptoms of those diseases, and then watch your crop and make sure that you're excluding any plants that show those symptoms from the plants that you save seeds. symptoms from the plants that you save seeds. So Ruth, if people are going to save their potatoes for seed, which is really common, and as you've said, it's not such a bad thing, but there are considerations to make about that. So can you talk a little bit about good practices in seed saving for potatoes? Yeah, absolutely.

If you are going to save your seed potatoes, it is important that fairly recently you have bought them from a certified grower. And I would suggest that people who save their seed potatoes do buy in seed potatoes every few years. That's the safest option. years, that's the safest option. But the potatoes that you are going to save should not just be the bag that is left over in the basement or in the storage in the spring. Look at your plants during the season. Look for the ones that are the most vigorous, that are the biggest and healthiest and mark those plants and plan to go in before you dig your main crop and take those out by hand so that you know that they have come from plants that were healthy. If you look online for information on potato diseases, you can find a lot of pictures that show you the symptoms of potato viruses especially. And if you see evidence of disease in those plants, then you should not be saving anything

from them. So particularly with viruses, you may see what's called mosaic symptoms where the leaves are mottled green and pale green or green and yellow. Anything like that is definitely going to stay in the tuber and come up the next year. So you want to avoid plants that look like that. One other caution is that a lot of potato viruses are carried by aphids. You can think of it as analogous to malaria being carried by mosquitoes. So aphids will come through the crop later in the year and they only need to be feeding on the potatoes for a few seconds to pass along a virus. And if it's late in the season, those plants may never show symptoms. So you won't actually be able to detect that the virus has gotten into your plants, but the virus can, in those cases, still go down

into the tubers. So that is why a lot of seed potato growers will try to harvest early. So that's another option for you if you really want to save your own seed potatoes to have a special plot that you have. You can even think ahead and try to chip those potatoes and really get them so that they're going to mature early. And then even cut down the vines early so that you can dig those seed potatoes and set them aside. You'll lose a little bit of yield, but it's far better to lose a little bit of yield for your seed crop than to have viruses come in and potentially make that a seed crop that's going to fail. Wow, so interesting. So in terms of, other than the yield loss, doing it that way, you're not affecting anything else about the

quality of the seed. They might be small potatoes and there might be less of them, but that's a way to hedge against the risk of things like aphids passing on problems to your plants. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's a good method to use, and especially for someone who's growing on a market scale, they're not really losing that much, especially when you consider the cost of seed potatoes.

If you're buying double certified, they are expensive. They sure are. Yeah. You might be able to just have 20 row seed or something like that that you dedicate to it. Okay. So saving seed is quite acceptable. Maybe think about getting that certified seed every few years, but in the years you're saving, just try and be a little more thoughtful about it so that the potatoes you are saving are at their highest possible quality. Yeah, absolutely. Commonly we hear for other seed production that a real benefit

to saving seed is that you can develop over generations, you can develop seed that is more adapted to your soil. But I guess I would think that doesn't really apply with potatoes because it's essentially you're just taking clones. You're taking cuttings. The genetics can't adapt, so to speak, to your environmental conditions. Exactly, because you are just taking cuttings. You may have the very occasional occurrence of a sport, and you may be able to select a tuber type that looks really good from that. But that's so rare that you're not really going to have a lot of change. We can talk maybe a little bit later about breeding for new varieties of potatoes and the ways in which people

can do that on their own farms to try to find varieties that are better suited to their location. Because that is feasible, but it's a little more challenging in potatoes than it is in some other crops. All right. Well, I'll ask you about that when we talk about your own breeding program at the end of our conversation. But anyway, the main takeaway point is that people should strongly consider looking to source their potatoes somewhere that has certification of their seed potatoes.

And in your talk, you talked about good operations that sell seed potatoes being double certified. Yeah, that's right. If you have a certified organic operation, then you're, at least in the US, your certifier is going to want to see that you are planting organically produced seed. And that can be a little bit challenging to find for potatoes. There are not very many producers of organic seed potatoes that are also producing certified seed potatoes where they've been certified to be healthy enough to plant. So yeah, if you find a producer that says they are double certified, then you know that they have not just the organic certification, then you know that they have not just the organic certification,

they also have the certification that their seed is healthy. And I just now want to follow up on a few things you mentioned in the last few minutes about healthy seed. Can you, like what, when you say the tuber age is important, that was a concept that I wasn't really, I mean, I don't really understand when you talk about tuber age. When we think about normal or true seed that, like, you know, corn seed or wheat seed, we know that it's fairly, I'm sorry, I'm having trouble thinking of the word. It's not very active. It's in a resting state. And so we sometimes think of seed potatoes in the same way, but seed potatoes are quite metabolically active. And they have a certain amount of resources stored up in the tuba in the form of starch and other carbohydrates.

And they're going to use that up to keep themselves alive. They're actually breaking down starch into sugar and using that sugar to respire. They're giving off carbon dioxide and water. So if you use up too much of those nutrients, Um, so if you use up too much of those nutrients, the potatoes essentially, um, do not have enough vigor to be really in good shape when you put them into the field. I don't really feel like I'm explaining this very well. No, no, I think you are. I think, I mean, I'm, I'm understanding you. First of all, I mean, the evidence of what you just said is, is it's, it's the reason

why, why from a culinary standpoint, everyone wants new potatoes because they haven't been metabolically active for very long in storage. And so they're, I would assume, at their sweetest and just freshest. That's why we get potatoes that don't cook as well or aren't quite as enjoyable when they're stored. But then it sounds like just the storage conditions can influence the rate at which potatoes, so to speak, age. Yeah. If they're stored at temperatures that are too high, then they will age a little faster. that are too high, then they will age a little faster. If you keep them down,

seed potatoes are usually stored at around, probably around 38 degrees Fahrenheit and sometimes as high as 40. And keeping them cooler means that they just, they are a little bit less active. They're not burning through as much of their carbohydrate resources. As they get older, part of this is not just based on the carbohydrate storage they have, it's also based on the innate dormancy of the tuber, which is genetically controlled.

So some varieties have a very long dormancy and they will not sprout for a really long time. So those ones you actually have to deliberately age a little bit to make sure that they're ready to grow when you put them in the field. Other varieties break dormancy really quickly and those are the varieties that can be frustrating to farmers who want to store their crop because those are the varieties that can be frustrating to farmers who want to store their crop because those are the ones that sprout in storage. And a lot of reds will do that.

A lot of red varieties will just, you know, you can only keep them for a fairly short time, maybe a couple of months before they start sprouting. So you can very easily check to see how old your potatoes are by taking a few of them out of storage and just leave them in normal room conditions for a week or so. And then take a look. If they're fairly young potatoes, then they might have a couple of sprouts at the rose end of the potato, opposite of where the stem was attached on the parent plant. If they're a little bit older, they'll have more sprouts, some of them from the rose end and some of them from further down on the tuber.

If they have really kind of thready sprouts, then they're probably getting a little bit old and may not be quite so vigorous when you plant them. And if you're saving your own seed potatoes, this can sometimes happen if they've been stored badly. You can get those really kind of thready, long sprouts. you can get those really kind of thready, long sprouts. And sometimes if potatoes get really desperate because they've been stored too long, they will start producing tiny little tubers right off the main tuber. And at that point, don't even try to plant them. Okay, so that's a bad sign if you see that.

Yeah, that's a bad sign. And that's not going to happen if you're buying from a reputable seed grower. That's only something that might happen if you're storing your own and just threw them into the basement. Okay, and then, all right. So I've got one more kind of just follow-up question from before. And you talked about trying to avoid stressing the potatoes. So there's the stress that can just come with, with, um, you know,

improper storage conditions. But, but in your talk, you also just talked about like, don't be too hard on your potatoes. Like, do I have, do I, do I, have I remember that right? Like just in terms of bruising and handling, um, that can negatively affect your, your seed potato ultimately. Yeah. I mean, my, my colleague Rouse, who gave the presentation with me, tends to say a potato should never fall more than two inches because they will bruise. So this is definitely a consideration at harvest. Obviously, if you're using a mechanical digger or harvester, they're going to get a little bit beat up. But yeah, when you're handling you just want to try and make sure

that they're not bouncing around too much. And that's one of the reasons why at harvest you make sure that the vines have died down completely because you want to give the tubers a little bit of time to sit in the ground and have their skins set and firm up a little bit so that you don't get skinning on the potatoes when you harvest them. Okay so we've talked about the

importance of sourcing certified seed potatoes just to ensure that you're not starting out with pathogens and we've talked about stress and tuber age and all that stuff and all this is towards goes towards producing the goal that as you said earlier those potatoes we've talked about stress and tuber age and all that stuff. And all of this is towards, goes towards producing the goal of, as you said earlier, those potatoes jumping out of the soil. Yeah. That's what we're aiming for.

We're aiming for potatoes that just like shoot out of the soil, both to shade out weeds, but also just in the overall service of a vigorous potato plant, that's going to give you good yields. But we're not quite there in terms of planting. I really want to talk to you about, about cutting and chitting. So, so you've, you've, you've managed to store your potatoes. Well, it's now getting towards the time, say it's February or March when you've got to be thinking

about the planting coming ahead. I was a little confused in the presentation just about the order of these things. So, so you're going to, you know, in just a moment, you're going to talk about cutting your potato just to, to essentially stretch your your your potato seed to be able to plant more um as well as chitting them which which has to do with intentionally sprouting them ahead of when you plant so can you can you take us through that and especially with regards to the order the best order so so start with your potatoes have been stored at the right temperature for long-term storage and now you got to start thinking about the planting that's coming yeah yeah for sure so your potatoes will have been stored at the right temperature for long-term storage, and now you've got to start thinking about the planting that's coming. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So your potatoes will have been stored hopefully at around 95% humidity, and if they're being stored for a long time, around 38 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. And then as you get ready for planting, you're going to want to warm them up so that they are starting to become more active, more metabolically active. The sprouts will start to grow and they'll be ready to really burst out of the soil when you plant them. So there are a couple of different approaches you can take. If you know that your potatoes have broken dormancy and you might know that because you took a few out and just left them around the house for a week or so and you saw that they were sprouting. If they're already broken dormancy then all you

might really need to do is warm them up for maybe a week or so and that would be at around 50 to 55 degrees fahrenheit and then they will be they'll be ready to to sprout when you plant them if your potatoes are a little bit more dormant or if you just want to really make sure that they're going to get growing very quickly you can do what's called, you can chip them. And that's something where you want to encourage them to produce very short, stubby little sprouts. Everyone has seen the bag of potatoes under the kitchen sink with the long white sprouts that are reaching up towards the light. Those long white sprouts develop in the dark.

They're trying to find some light and they're very fragile and easy to damage. So you want to have really tough, sturdy little sprouts on the potatoes. And so you want to expose them to light. It doesn't need to be a whole lot of light, but if they get a bit of illumination, then the sprouts will be green and they'll be really tough. So that's called chitting. In Europe, it's a pretty common practice and often it's called pre-sprouting or green sprouting. So you want to do that at about probably 60 degrees or so. If you look online, you'll find quite a range of different recommendations for

what temperature you churn at. I personally think that the most important thing is that they do have some light. I think that's what they're going to respond to the most. And you would want to have them at, I think, at least 55 degrees Fahrenheit. So churning is something that you can do before you cut the potatoes. But you want to keep in mind that if you can do before you cut the potatoes, but you want to keep in mind that if you're chitting them ahead of time, that it's probably going to be better to cut them by hand. If you are at a scale where you have to use a machine cutter, then it may actually be better to pre-cut the potatoes and then store them because that way you don't risk damaging sprouts that have already formed on the potatoes.

Sorry, Ruth, I'm going to stop you because I've got my potatoes chitting right now, but I've made a mistake because I cut them right before having them chit. You're saying I should have done that while they were still dormant? No, no, not necessarily. You really, potatoes are, I'm probably making it sound like they're really delicate, but potatoes are really quite adaptable. They, because they're metabolically active, they will heal. So if you cut them and then set them out to chit,

that's actually great for them because you'll have them in fairly warm conditions and they go through an active healing process. You know how when you cut a potato after you leave it out for a while, that cut surface will have dried up and be kind of a little bit tough. So that's an active process where the potato is actually forming a surface with a material called suberin. And that's a really nice, tough wound protection. really nice, tough, um, wind protection. So if you want to, if you want to cut your potatoes and then set them out to chip, that is also a perfectly good way to do it. Okay. And, and so I just, uh, we're going to have to move on here, but, but, um, well, first of all, the cutting,

just to touch on that, um, like what, what, what's the basic principle of proper cutting? You need to leave at least one eye on each piece, is that right? Yeah, so your new plant is growing from the eye, so you need to have at least one eye on each seed piece. And ideally, you'll be aiming for about a two ounce seed piece, and try to make sure that that is a nice blocky chunk of potato. You don't want slivers because they're going to dry out and shrivel up and you won't get a healthy plant or a vigorous plant out of that. And make sure that your cutting knives are sharp, whether you're doing it by hand or using a machine. You don't want to have ragged cuts because those are

potentially going to be a way for bacteria and fungi to get into your potatoes so nice clean cuts and so if you if people follow the the two ounce rule to keep your keep your ultimate each piece above two ounces has the research shown that that that by cutting your potatoes you're not affecting ultimate yields too much you know in terms of the size of the actual seed potato you're putting in the ground? Yeah, there has been a fair amount of research into that. And the results, you know, things vary a little bit depending on the year and on the variety. But overall, it doesn't make a big difference whether you plant small whole seed pieces, which a lot of people like to do. Often those are sold as B-sized potatoes. Or if you buy larger potatoes and cut them.

So long as you handle them properly, keep them at appropriate temperatures, and keep them in pretty high humidity, they should be just fine. It won't make a big difference to the yield. Okay. So we've talked about sourcing good seed potatoes and the reasons for doing that. We've talked about cutting, and I think more importantly, we've talked about chitting. Now, I want to ask you, though, this could be considered all just kind of academic, essentially.

Does it really matter in terms of those potatoes jumping out of the ground, in terms of the ultimate yields? You know, are these factors we've talked about, can it really make a difference in terms of vigor and in terms of ultimate yields? I think that if you are in northern latitudes, chitting is a really smart thing to do because it does push the potato maturity forward. Not only will they come up more quickly and be more vigorous when they come up,

but they will also start to form tubers earlier, and they will reach their peak yield earlier. So I think it's worth doing because it allows you to get the crop out of the ground sooner. A lot of the skill, I think, in growing organic potatoes is understanding that there are certain pests and diseases that are going to want to suck some of the energy out of your potato crop. You can think of your potato crop as this nice, juicy resource out in the field that various organisms want a piece of. So the faster you can get that through the season

and into storage, the better in a lot of ways. And pre-spouting allows you to do that. And then one factor I just want to touch on really quick is just the soil temperature. I think a lot of people rush their planting when the soil is still quite cool. Is that okay, or would you advise against that? Oh, I would advise against that, but I completely understand why people do it. You know, when we had that early burst of warm weather, I wanted to run out there and start planting right away.

And when the air temperatures are warm, it's very tempting to think that it's time to get out there and plant. But potatoes are going to do best if you can plant them when the soil has warmed up to around 50, 55 degrees. And it's really worth waiting for a number of reasons. If you are planting potatoes into cold soil, then they're just going to sit there. They're not going to sprout very quickly. And the longer potatoes or any seed really sits in the ground, the longer it is just a nice chunk of food for some fungus or some bacteria to come along or some insect maybe to come along and munch on.

So if you have that cold seed sitting out there, then you can get stand problems later on because some of your seed has just rotted in the ground. So the other reason that it's important to plant into warm soil is that if you have warmed your potatoes up and had them sitting at around maybe 55 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, then you're putting them into soil where the soil temperature and the seed temperature are very similar. And that means that you are not going to end up with moisture that is maybe condensing or sitting in the soil around the tuber because you're not going to have a big temperature differential between the seed piece and the soil. If you have pockets of water around the seed piece,

that creates a really great environment for bacteria to get in and rot the seed piece. So that's another reason to try to plant when the soil is warm. Okay. piece. So that's just, that's another reason to try to plant when the soil is warm. Okay. So Ruth, you've taken us to the point of getting potatoes in the ground and giving them the best possibility of giving you a great crop. And I had planned to ask you so much more about pests and pathogens and harvesting and storage and all that stuff. But I think we're going to have to wait. We've roared through our time together here, and maybe that's appropriate. This is the time of year people are planting,

and you've hopefully given them their best shot at putting in a great crop. So I'd love to have you back sometime to talk about some of those other topics. How do you feel about that? Yeah, I would love to come back. And this is definitely the danger when you ask someone who's enthusiastic about potatoes.

They will just not stop talking about them. Yeah, this is not the first time it's happened on an episode with an extension agent or academic. So look, I know that the one concern you have is you don't want to scare people away. I mean, we've gone into depth into all this stuff can, I know it can cause people to overthink it overall. Um, if people, I just get the sense that people just try and follow some of these major principles you've talked about sourcing good certified seed, um, trying to get storage more or less right. Thinking about maybe chitting their potatoes before they get them in the ground and waiting until the soil is at that right temperature. It's going to put them in a good situation. But either way, they shouldn't be discouraged from

putting potatoes in the ground. Yeah, I think that's very true. Potatoes are a great crop. They can be extremely productive. And there's always more to learn. There's always more that you can delve into in a topic. And as an academic, that's what I tend to do. But yeah, the basic principles are pretty straightforward. And I think the most important thing is for people to remember that the seed potatoes are actually, they're living plants. They're dormant right now. But if you just put a little bit of thought into the way they're stored and the way they're handled, they're going to do a good job for you when you get them out to the field.

Okay. Well, before we say goodbye, I wanted to ask you about one of the things you're focusing on in your work, in your research, which is you're engaged in a breeding program to try and come up with some specialty potatoes to give farmers more options for marketing. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah. Yeah. This is something I'm really excited about. So we talked about how potatoes are generally vegetatively propagated. Well, a lot of potatoes will also produce tree seeds, and we generally, to distinguish them from seed potatoes,

which are the tubers, we usually call them tree potato seed, or TPS for short. So when you see your potatoes flowering, you can go back a few weeks later, and you will see little berries that have formed from the flowers. Sometimes those berries will just drop off the plant. Other times they'll hang on for quite a while. One word of caution, don't ever eat those berries.

They are extremely poisonous. But they are packed full of seeds. And those seeds are going to have a lot of genetic variability in them. Potatoes are tetraploids, which means that they have four copies of each chromosome, so four copies of their genome. And they're very heterogeneous, which just means there's a lot of genetic variability in them. So when you have a cross between two potato varieties, you can get a lot of different shapes and sizes and colors of potatoes. If you cross a yellow on a yellow, you'll probably get

a lot of yellows. But if you cross a yellow on a purple or a red and a purple, you will get a huge range of different things. So we are working with a number of farmers to supply them with true potato seed, and some of them are also going to learn to make the crosses themselves. It's extremely easy to do. And then they are going to grow out seedlings from those seeds. You can start them pretty much the same as tomato seeds. And then when they get big enough, put them out in the field. And that's going to give them a lot of variability to choose from and to see what is well adapted to their growing conditions. And so they will be saving the tubers from those potatoes and growing them on the next year

so that we can get a really good look at how well-suited they are to different organic growing conditions. And what seems so cool is that, unlike a lot of other plant breeding programs, you grow out, you're going to get tons of variability. So you're just going to put the seed out and then see what you get.

But then if I understand you and understand potatoes once you grow a plant out and get some potatoes and realize that a they they taste really good and it turns out they store really good you don't have further um what's it called you don't have to keep breeding them to like to to to to stabilize the line you just now start cloning those potatoes and you've got a new variety. Hey, that's right. That's right. That is one of the really fun things about it. If you find something that looks good, then yeah, just hold onto those tubers and, uh, and you've got a new variety. So I do have listeners, you know, down your way. Are you still looking for people to participate? I mean, is it kind of a closed program?

Or is there any way that people can participate? Is there a website? Oh, yeah. Yeah, our website is all one word, organicpotato.wisc.edu. And people can go there and read about what we're doing and there's a contact form if people are interested in getting

involved they're very welcome to contact me and the True Potato Seed project is very open for other people to get involved whether they are growing on a large scale or a market scale or even just in their backyards.

The great thing about it is that you can grow one plant or you can grow 1,000, depending on whatever you want to do. And I think it's a really exciting way for people to learn a little bit about how really it's very easy to do this sort of stuff. It's easy to get involved. Because potatoes are so variable, you will see a lot of different things when you grow out these seeds. And, you know, it's possible that a lot of them will not be that great, but you may find a few jewels in your potato hill when you dig it up. in your potato hill when you dig it up.

Are you, you know, do you have your heart set on creating like a wonderful variety and calling it, you know, the ginger? Well, maybe I could call it the ginger. My mother was a school teacher and all the little kids called her Mrs. Ginger, so maybe it could be the ginger potato after her. I would love to breed a really nice variety. I'm not too worried about what I call it. But, yeah, it would be really exciting, and I'm really excited to be working with farmers on this as well

because, to me, that is the real strength of this breeding program is that we have quite a number of farmers who are working together on this and who are going to be sharing what they find. And my dream is really to see a network of organic farmers who are educated and knowledgeable about how to breed potatoes and how to select for what does well on their farm and who are linked into this network where they can share their resources. I think that would be a very exciting thing to have happen.

And in terms of resources on just on growing good potatoes and some of the stuff we talked about today, that URL you gave before, are there links from there to resources on some of the stuff we talked about? Just good production practices? Yeah, there's a link in the sidebar that goes to a list of resources. So yeah, definitely take a look at that. And some of that is from research that I've done, and then a lot of it links out to other resources in different parts of the country. Okay, well, Ruth, Ginger, thank you so much for your time today.

I hope we can find time later in the season to talk about some of the mid-season approaches to potato production, consideration of pests and pathogens and all the rest. But for now, I will thank you very much, and I hope you have a great season of your own with your breeding program. Thank you very much, Jordan. I really appreciate you having me on. It was fun. So that was awesome, no? I loved talking to Ruth.

I thought she was just delightful, and so I will thank you one more time, Ruth, for coming on the show to share all that really important knowledge with us. What else do I want to tell you before I sign off? Things have been going well. I have some mini episodes coming up in which I share some of your ideas that you've submitted that you want to share with other farmers and gardeners. So look forward to those.

They'll come off the weekly schedule. They'll just come at random times and they'll be rather short. So I hope you'll check them out. i hope you'll consider submitting an idea you can text me at 250-767-6636 with your idea and i'll i'll get a hold of you we'll we'll talk about it you can phone my skype number 310-734-8426 i hope hope that's right. Oh, man. Or send me an email, editor at theruminant.ca. Tell me your idea and invite me to phone you and talk about it. I would love to do that and share it with other listeners. Another thing you can do for me and for the podcast is if you like this podcast,

whatever directory you're listening in, whether it's, well, particularly if it's on iTunes, you can go into iTunes and actually rate this podcast. And as I understand, that'll really help me show up in rankings within iTunes and help other people find the podcast. So if you like it, please go and give it a rating or review. And if that applies to whatever podcast directory you're using, if they offer user reviews or ratings or anything like that, and you enjoy this podcast i would really appreciate it if you would take the time to rate it and like i say help people find it so that's all i'm going to say for now have a great week talk to you later

some real soul searching and here's my final resolve i don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and braces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces. And live next door to the birds and the bees. And live life like it was meant to be ba ba ba da ba ba ba ba

ba da da da ha ha ha ha ha ha do do do do do do do do do do do do do do