 Hello everyone. Our soil temperatures have finally warmed up to 45 degrees. It's time to get started planting in our garden. Now one of the first vegetables that we can plant in a garden are potatoes. Like I said, as soon as your soil temperatures get about 45 degrees, it's time to get your potatoes in the ground. Now, Good Friday is traditional time to plant your potatoes, but a lot of times our soil temperatures haven't warmed up enough at that point. So it's important to go by soil temperature, not necessarily by date when you're getting ready to plant your potatoes. So I have cut my potatoes up a couple days ago. They peeled up, they're ready to go. I'm planting a mix of white, Yukon gold potatoes and then a red russet potato in my garden. Now when I put my seed potatoes in, I'm going to space them about 10 to 12 inches apart. That gives each potato adequate growing room. They're not going to crowd each other out. So I'm going to get a good healthy crop of potatoes. Now when we're planting potatoes, it's important to know how a potato grows. Do you understand some of the extra steps you have to take? Potatoes sprout little tubers along their stem as they're growing. So after I plant these guys in my trench, it's about four inches deep. Four to five inches is a good depth to plant your potatoes. It's going to give them plenty of room to grow. So once these guys are planted, I'm going to wait about four weeks or till my potatoes are about a foot tall. And I'm going to come back and I'm going to pile another six to eight inches of soil around that stem. Because our potatoes produce little potatoes all up and down the stem, it's important that we add that six to eight inches of soil in a process known as healing. That keeps those potatoes from getting exposed to the sunlight and turning green. Once that happens, we can't eat those potatoes. So be sure and come back and do that healing later on. You can hill your potatoes right now as soon as they're planted. I typically like to wait so they don't have to grow through quite as much soil. Now if you want, it's perfectly good to add some fertilizer right now. Most of our soils don't need it, but if you want to, I would recommend a soil test if you haven't. That'll tell you if you need to add more nutrients to your soil. So I'm going to cover my potatoes right now. If you can't plant potatoes in your garden, there's a variety of reasons why that might be a problem. You have diseases, insects, other issues with your soil. You just don't have a good location. You can grow potatoes very easily in a container. I typically choose one that is about two feet deep. A potato, a container that's two feet deep, you're going to have enough space for your roots to grow, your tubers to form, but you're also not going to have a container that's so deep that you can't keep the top and the bottom evenly moist. A lot of times you get really deep containers. Your top will dry out, but your bottom is still going to be wet. So those tubers at the bottom are rotting while the potato at the top is showing signs that it's too dry. Again with your potatoes, when you plant them in a container, you'll want to use a 50-50 mix of compost and a peat-based potting soil. You'll put about six inches of soil in the bottom of your container, plant your potato pieces. The rule of thumb is generally one piece of potato for every five gallons of pot. So if you have a pot that's two feet tall by about two feet wide, that's somewhere between a 15 and 20 gallon pot. So you'll plant four pieces of potato in that pot. Now once you've got your six inches of soil, you've got your four potatoes, you add another six to eight inches of soil in there. Make sure you're not filling your pot to the top yet, because just like our potatoes in the ground, you're going to have to add another six to eight inches of soil and fill your potatoes in in the container. So it's important to have a really deep pot when you're planting your potatoes. Now just like any other garden vegetable, make sure you water your potatoes and adequately keep them evenly moist throughout the growing season, but potatoes are really easy vegetable to grow. They're very plentiful, so you only need a few potatoes or a few rows of potatoes to feed a family. Now the general rule of thumb when you're planting your potatoes for how much you'll need, how many seed potatoes you'll need, is about 15 pounds of seed potato for every 100 feet of row. So my rows are relatively short. I probably have oh 20, 15 feet of rows here, 20 feet of row. So I really don't need more than two pounds of potatoes total to plant my plant my garden. But I hope you guys enjoyed learning how to plant potatoes. If you have any questions, please feel free to talk to your local extension office. Thank you guys and have a wonderful growing and gardening season.