 Welcome to getting clean on the prairies. What you're looking at here is my potato patch. This is all covered with pea straw and I use the no dig, no rototill, no weeding, no watering method for my potatoes. So it's also known as the Ruth Stout Method. So I'm going to be planting all my potatoes just under this layer of straw and won't be digging any of them into the ground. But before I do that, we're about a month away from when it's warm enough to plant potatoes. So the first thing we need to do is get those potatoes chitting. So I'm going to take you into the garage and show you how to chit your potatoes and tell you why you should do that. Okay, so here are my potatoes that I have started chitting. Got them here in a east-facing window in my garage and I got three different kinds going. Yukon Gold, Russet Gold Rush and some Red Norlands. So if you've never heard of the word chitting before, it simply means encouraging your potatoes or your tubers to sprout. So sprouting your potatoes is kind of the same method as you do with any other plant that you start indoors. You want to encourage some nice green healthy sprouts so that when you plant them in the ground, they have a good start. So the reason that you want to sprout your potatoes is it gives them of course a head start once you put them into the ground and it's a faster growth method and hopefully heavier crops. So in order to successfully chit your potatoes, you want to put them in an open brightly lit area that is not too warm. You want it to be cool, but definitely don't want them to freeze. So if you're putting them out in a greenhouse or in your garage, make sure that the temperatures aren't going to be below freezing. I have mine out in my garage here that is a heated garage and facing like a set of south east window. So it's getting lots of light and I really encourage a lot of healthy growth here so far. So chitting, sprouting, you should try to do about four to six weeks before you are going to be planting your potatoes. You want to have like I say the hard green dark colored sprouts such as these. These are seed potatoes that I purchased in the store. You can also use organic type potatoes that maybe you bought at a grocery store or a farmer's market, or if you have your own potatoes from last year, those will be the best to use as well. Now if you have purchased your seed potatoes from the store, from a greenhouse in bags like this, or if you are using seed potatoes that you've had stored in a dark place, you may find that they have already started trying to sprout and they'll have kind of, you know, usually longer white type looking sprouts because they've been trying to find the light and those sprouts are usually kind of weak and not really the best for when you go to plant them into the ground. So if you see that on your seed potatoes when you purchase them or when you bring them out of your potato bin, I would suggest you remove those and let them start a new sprout in some bright light so that you get that nice green colored sprout that you see on these. So another way to make your seed potatoes go farther is to take your big ones like this and as long as you can have one or two healthy eyes on your potato, you can cut these up and get your seeds, multiply your seeds and have more plants that way. So I'll just show you how we're going to cut up one of these. So this is one of my red norlands here. I'm just going to try and get maybe three separate seed potatoes out of this by cutting through. As you can see here, I still have a lot of eyes on this one. Here I got a root there, another one there. I could probably cut this one into another piece because we got quite a healthy root here and here so I'm just going to give it another cut. As I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I do normally plant my potatoes under straw. I haven't done a traditional type planting of potatoes for several years and the under straw method has worked well for me. I'm also going to probably pot up a few in some containers pretty soon just because it's just another method that I enjoy doing and it's something that if you only have a small space and you still want to have some wonderful homegrown potatoes, growing them in a container works really well as well. As you can see here, I'm using egg cartons to chip my potatoes in. They work good because you can easily stand them up in here and they get a little bit of air flow. So something like this or a container where you can spread them out as long as they're getting air and a good amount of bright light. Another good reason to chip your potatoes or let them sprout before you plant them, you have a good idea then of whether you have a healthy seed potato or not. If you just were to plant them without any sprouts on them, you run the risk of maybe them not being a healthy seed plant that won't grow and that just may rot in the ground. Being in a cold climate where I am here, any way that you can get a jump start on growing your vegetables is always the best way. We have a short growing season so we are about four weeks away from putting these into the ground. I might try it a little sooner depending on how warm our spring is so make sure if you want to watch me plant under straw and in containers that you hit the subscribe button so you don't miss out on that video. Okay so as you can see here I have multiplied my seeds probably three times as many as I got in the bag. There was probably about a dozen of each potato in these bags when I purchased them and now I probably have three or four times as many seeds to plant and I will just make sure that they are healing and the green sprouts continue to grow. So just set it so that the sprouts are turned up towards the light. They have plenty of airflow. Once again they are not to be frozen or get too warm so I hope you enjoyed watching how I chip my potatoes and get them ready for planting. If you enjoyed this video please be sure to leave a comment and hit that like button and stay tuned for the next video where I will be planting these potatoes in containers and under straw. Thanks for watching!