 Hey everybody, these guys showed up in my grocery store a couple weeks ago, and I just wanted to take a couple minutes today and talk about seed potatoes and what you do before you plant a potato in the ground, because what you do before can be as important as actually planting them and getting them growing. So I get questions sometimes, I bought these guys, now what do I do with them? Well the first thing, congratulations, you bought certified seed potatoes, it's important because these guys have been inspected to make sure that they don't have diseases or insects, so you're not spreading new things to your garden. Typically we don't recommend to buy potatoes from a grocery store and buy a regular baking potato or buy the bagged potatoes, they haven't been inspected, they should be disease-free but they might not be, and a lot of our potatoes that they sell in a grocery store have been sprayed with a chemical to prevent them from sprouting. Now we know after a while they eventually do sprout, but they're not going to be as productive as actual seed potatoes. So we bought our seed potatoes, our next step is let's identify the most important part of them. So you can see on these guys I have little growths. These are coming from the eye of the potato and those are the growing points. So it's important that we have at least two of these for every part of the potato that we plant. So our eye are where new potatoes are going to come from. Now if your seed potatoes haven't been nice and started to sprout like mine, eyes are also these little indentations on the potato, sometimes you can see the little growing points on them as well, but those little indentations are where the eye is and that's where our potatoes are going to start to spread and grow from. Now typically when we plant potatoes we want our pieces to be about the size of a golf ball or about one and a half to two ounces. So this little guy, I'm going to leave whole, I'm not going to cut him up. You need enough energy or enough potato there for these sprouts to have energy as they get started growing. So one and a half to two ounces, roughly the size of a golf ball. So this guy I'm going to leave whole. Now these guys I'm going to cut up and I'm going to start with this one. So remember we want about two eyes to a potato. So I'm going to take a look at this and there's going to be a couple pieces where I'm definitely going to have more than two eyes. They're just growing really close together. So I'm going to start here and I'm actually going to cut this potato right there. And I'm going to plant this piece so this meets our size. We have one eye growing for sure there. You've got another couple on here. So I'm going to cut this piece and use it. Now this one I am going to cut a little different because I have five pieces there. We still need that one and a half to two ounces, but you might have to get a little creative if you have a lot of eyes growing together. So I'm going to cut this one at an angle. I still get three eyes. This should still be enough potato. And then the rest of it I'm going to cut here. And I'm going to look at this one. I've got eye there. There's an eye there. So I'm going to cut this potato at an angle again, just like that. So this guy still has a couple eyes on it. If I really wanted to, I could cut this piece just a little bit smaller. There's plenty of eyes to do that. And I'm going to go ahead and do that. So if you are going to plant potatoes, how much do you need? Well, how many pounds of potatoes are you going to need to plant your garden? The average is for every 100 feet of row you have, you need approximately 15 pounds of potato. So if you're only going to plant a 10 foot row, you need about one and a half pounds of potato. 20 foot row, three pounds should get you there. But we'll talk more about planting potatoes in a later video. The key, typically you plant potatoes, the tradition is to plant potatoes on Easter. The soil temperature is far more important than the date. Your soil temperatures need to be at least 45 degrees in order for your potatoes to grow and thrive. Right now, last time I looked, temperatures are not 45 degrees. So be sure and check your local weather station. If you have a temperature probe, you can check your own garden. There's plenty of endon stations across North Dakota. Use those endon stations. They have temperature probes, it'll give you an idea of roughly what your soils are going to be. But again, planting potatoes is really easy, getting them ready is easy. Typically I let mine heal for about three to four days before I plant them. I need to keep them in a dark room, kind of cool, want humidity, but not direct keep moisture on them directly. That'll let them get kind of a leathery appearance. We don't want them to dry out because then our little eyes are going to die, especially now that they're already growing. You don't have to let them heal. That's perfectly fine to just plant them straight in the ground, but I typically let mine just to keep them from rotting. Hope you guys enjoyed this video on getting seed potatoes cut up and ready to go. Happy growing this year.