 Welcome everybody to the Spring Fever Garden Forums. This is where we connect you, the gardener, to the researchers at North Dakota State University. And my name is Tom Cobb. I'm an extension horticulturist in the Department of Plant Sciences. So let's get started. Let's talk about potatoes. And potatoes, one of the biggest crops in North Dakota, both in the garden and on the farm. And here to talk about potatoes is Dr. Andy Robinson. Andy is an associate professor and the extension potato agronomist for both North Dakota State University and the University of Minnesota. Andy developed science-based solutions to address problems in potato production, enabling producers to both increase economic and environmental sustainability through improved crop production management. And Andy's passion is potatoes. So you're the best person to teach us about potatoes. So Andy, welcome to the forums. Thank you. Thanks Tom for the opportunity to be here. So I'm gonna talk about growing tasty taters in your garden. Potatoes are one of my favorite things, as Tom mentioned. So why potatoes? Well, it's the number one consumed vegetable in the United States. It has a high nutritional value and low cost. Some research that came out of Washington a few years back showed potato had one of the lowest costs to buy and one of the highest nutrient values. The only crop above it was dry beans. And the other big reason why we have potatoes is because they have a very high production. You typically are going to get somewhere between seven to 9% more production per area than a grain crop like wheat or corn or something like that. And the big reason is because potatoes have a lot of water but it's all food and it's good for you. And what I always say, that potatoes themselves are very healthy. It's just all the other things that you put on them that make them not so healthy. So let's talk a little bit about potato varieties. There's a lot of different shades and colors of potatoes they come in. Commonly, of course, here are red potatoes. There's also yellows, which are gaining more popularity. And then you have some russets, whites, purples, fingerlings, et cetera. They vary in size, shape, form. And they're also very in their length of growing season. There's some that are short of 70 days, some that'll take 150 days or longer to grow. And so really selecting the right variety that suits your needs and your desires is important to do. So just talking about varieties a little bit, let's focus on reds. Reds are the most common fresh potato in the Midwest of the United States. They tend to have more of a waxy texture when you eat them. And so they're suitable for a lot of culinary uses in homes. Most of them have a white flesh, but there are some varieties that will have a yellow flesh. Some common varieties that are grown or probably red Norland is the most commonly grown, red Pontiac is also grown, has a very good flavor. And red Lasota is one that's grown a little bit more in hotter climates, but we do have some here too. If we look at yellow skin potatoes, yellows have been increasing in popularity for a number of years. And the number of yellow potatoes grown when we look at it at a national continues to increase. And so there's certainly a consumer demand and desire to eat yellow potatoes. Yellow potatoes are very common in Europe and other countries. So there's a lot of good varieties out there, good genetics out there that we can actually get and use and grow in our gardens. And they're very similar to the red potatoes. They tend to have more of a waxy texture. Some of them can be more starchy, but they can be used for a lot of things in Europe. They use them even for chipping and frying. And some do have a wider flesh, some have a yellow flesh, even a dark yellow flesh. And that yellow flesh is actually a result of the carton wings that are in there. And so some people say it gives it more of a buttery flavor. So Yukon Gold is probably the one, the most commonly known ones that we have. But when you look in catalogs, you can find things like German Butterball, Satina, other varieties. And then we go to the whites and rustits. I group these together because typically our white and rusted potatoes are the ones that have a higher starch content that utilize for making French fries and potato chips. If you go to the East Coast, white skin potatoes, like this pitcher with lots of tubers on it, is the most common fresh potato you'll buy there. Russet Burbank is the most common Russet variety. Russets typically are the most oblong potato and they're used for making French fries, but you go out West, that's the most common potato out West that people are gonna have in their homes and then buy at grocery stores as a Russet potato. They're very good dormancy. They store for a long time and they tend to have more of that mealy texture to them when you eat them. So the last one we'll mention here are the potatoes, the pinto potatoes and the fingerlings. These are a little bit more of the specialties and they come in all different kinds of sizes and shapes and splashes of colors. They're typically similar to the reds and yellows. They tend to have more of a waxy texture to them and smooth flavor that you're gonna get. And they can be a little bit more challenging to grow sometimes maybe not as much production as some of the other varieties but they're a lot of fun to grow, I think and fun to try out. So here's just some examples. I looked at some seed catalogs and you can order potato seeds in a lot of places but just looking at these seed catalogs is a couple of screenshots. You can see they've got reds, yellows, purples, fingerlings, pintos, et cetera. They've got all kinds of types of potatoes that they would sell you. And so there's a lot of options out there. So let's talk a little bit about growing potatoes. So some tips on seed. We really recommend buying certified seed. Don't save your seed from the previous year and regrow it. There's a variety of reasons why the main reason though is because the pathogen buildup you can get virus that's transmitted through aphids or diseases that could compromise the yield and production of that potato. And especially when you have virus it's just gonna continue to spread year after year after year. And that slowly reduces your yield and your quality of YouTubers. Usually we're gonna recommend to plant your potatoes when those eyes just start to beep. You'll just start to see that it's a little bit of growth out of those eyes. If you cut the seed that will actually help break the dormancy. It'll actually cause the biochemical systems to kick into place where they will start to say, hey, I need to start growing. And so when you do plant your seed potatoes into the soil you really wanna try to match the temperature of your tuber with the soil. And so an easy way to do that is to take a thermometer such as if you have a meat thermometer that will go down low enough to maybe like 40, 50 degrees. You just poke it inside the tuber leave it in there for a couple of minutes see what the temperature is. And you can actually use that same thermometer and put it in the soil. At the location in the soil where you're gonna plant the tuber. You wanna be really within about 10 degrees matching from the tuber to soil temperature. Cause what that'll do if that tuber is too cold it'll cause condensation around it which could lead to bacterial diseases. And so that's important to match the temperature. And then if it's too hot to cold it can stress it. So anyways, important is to keep good moisture you don't want wet stopping soil where you can squeeze it and you have water dripping out of it but you also don't want soil that's so dry that you can't even like make a fall out of it. So maintaining good soil moisture through the growing season is gonna be important. So some tips on planting. A common recommendation is to plant two weeks prior to the last frost cause it will take those tubers about two to three weeks for the sprouts to grow. And you want that soil temperature between about 45 and 70 degrees as a figure here I show it on the right it just shows how fast those sprouts grow. And so they will grow at 45 degrees but they do very slowly. The sprouts are gonna grow the fastest when the soil temperature is at about 70 degrees and it's kind of the range but yeah if you can get your soil between 55 to 70 degrees you can have fairly rapid emergence of your potatoes as long as those eyes are the dormancies broke those eyes are starting to peep. Some things people use might use tunnels or mulches that'll increase the soil, the temperature or help out try to warm things up quicker if they want to get those out of the ground faster. Mulches can also help with controlling weeds and maintaining moisture in those hills. So those are things that can be done. So preparing the soil with fertility is very important. Potatoes do use a lot of nutrition they have really a poor rooting system so that's why they need to stay moist and that's why they need good fertilizer because that poor root system is not very efficient at taking those up. So most commonly, you know, you wanna if you're planting rows to rows like in this picture you gotta decide how far apart you're going to do it. And then typically you're gonna plant your seed pieces about six inches deep about the length of a dollar bill. And then reshaping the hills is important because that will prevent tubers from getting green from sunlight. It helps maintain the moisture in the hill and it's a common practice that we use right after planting just depends on how you plant if you plant into big beds you may not have to reshape your hills but if you have smaller hills when you plant you can put more dirt on them and increase the size and the width. So by planting deeper, you will have more consistent moisture at that depth versus planting at two or three inches on a hill, on a red shell you're gonna tend to try that out a little bit more. Planting whole seed is actually good because it reduces the potential for bacteria and the disease entry. If you do cut your seed, what you should do is you to plant it immediately and then it will heal in the soil or you can super rise it basically, let that cut heal it takes about seven to 10 days and you wanna maintain about 90 to 95% relative humidity. And a good way to do that is if you have like an area you can just take like a burlap bag and wet it and just lay it on the floor next to it take a few of those will help keep the moisture up and about 50 to 55 degrees is kind of what you look for when you're trying to put a good healing on that on that seed piece. If it's too dry, it just basically just dries up on the edge and it's easily broken which makes an entry point for diseases. So as far as spacing goes to within the rows just kind of a general principle the wider or the more distance between tubers is going to mean more room for those plants to grow which means those tubers will get bigger the closer together you plant then the more competition you have and the smaller the tubers will be typically the amount of tubers per stem is genetically controlled. And so if you know you have a variety that sets a lot of tubers and you want them to grow a little bigger you can just space your seed out a little bit more or if you want them to have smaller tubers maybe more of the bite sized tubers then just plant them closer together. So as far as nutrition goes potatoes like I said use a lot of fertilizer, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are very much needed in potatoes. So if you can find something that's like a 10, 10, 10 20, 20 or 10, 15, 10 or something along those lines you're gonna put about three to four pounds of that fertilizer per every 30 it's three by 30 rows, three by 30 feet of row space. So that's about 90 square feet that's about the amount that you would use. If you're going to use fertilizers make sure they don't have herbicides on them or using mulches from your grass if your yard has been sprayed with say a herbicide to control weeds don't use those mulches we've I've seen and had issues with that before. Typically, you know, you're going to fertilize at planting right before planting or when you're going to reshape your hills and so you want most of your fertilizer up front and I'll show you why here. So you can see this figure here don't really pay attention to the numbers so much but you can just kind of see in that first 30 to 60 days that's when the plants take up most of that nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and so that's why they need it up front because they're going to take that up early on to get that plant growing to get those tubers start to grow and then their needs less and as the season goes on. So that's why we typically put most of our fertility up front. So when growing the potatoes we want to like I said maintain most moist soils and we want to manage the pest, fertilize them and then a couple of big things too is if late blight and I'll show you some pictures of what late blight looks like if you suspect that we want to send samples to the laboratory in DSU because it's a community disease and it will spread. I mean, tomatoes will actually usually show at first but potatoes are very susceptible as well as peppers and eggplants, any solanaceae crops can be susceptible to late blight and it's a very devastating disease it can wipe out your crop in just a matter of days and either leaving it into the tubers and cause the tubers to rot. If you're going to store potatoes remove the vines about two to three weeks before harvesting and that'll allow the skins on those tubers to set we call it skin set but just those skins will harden so they don't get ripped or torn at harvest because if they get ripped or torn you're going to lose moisture and you're going to have a disease entry point. So this is late blight. Late blight is what caused the Irish potato famine. This fungus will get on the plants and you can see on the far right picture that's kind of the early stages get kind of those black watery marks as it develops you get a little bit of like a light green halo around it and it can get in the tubers and so it's a really bad disease and we want to really try to prevent that one as much as possible. Early blight is another problem that's often called target spot in other countries because it kind of has a target looking spot on that leaf. This is endemic you're going to see it every year. Plants that are stressed for nitrogen are going to be more likely to have this and especially on the lower leaves. So one of the keys is maintaining good fertility will help prevent this disease. So you don't want to overwater this is a picture from some of our plots. One year we had a bunch of rainfall but this is bad because it can lead to a variety of different problems. The lenticels, the little air spots on the tubers will they exchange air and those can enlarge that can allow entry of bacterial soft rot. You can get stem rot from over watering or even black heart of the tubers which is just a blackening on the inside of the tuber because it doesn't have enough oxygen. So this is what lenticel enlargement looks like. You can kind of see the scars and as those tubers sit you see these little halos around the lenticels is actually a disease are growing. You can see here on the far right it's spreading more and soft bacterial soft rot is the common thing that we see but sometimes you'll have these lenticels will pop they look just fine but as tubers stay in storage longer it will develop the soft rot of the tubers we've probably all seen this on a year when you get a lot of rain or you accidentally overwater it or something happens the tubers completely break down and they stink and that's just really a result of too much water and the tuber can't breathe. And this is the black heart I mentioned that sometimes you get a blackening of the interior of the tuber it's just because the tuber can't get enough air it doesn't go all the way to soft rot but it's a physiological disorder we call it because those cells basically die there and it can happen anytime during the growing season or when you're storing the tubers if they don't get enough oxygen they're a living organism and they need to breathe too. If you underwater there's always problems with this too you reduce your growth, you stress the plants you can cause the tubers to get ugly, growth cracks common scab or common things that happen from stress events and potatoes. So growth cracks like this can be caused from a lot of things diseases can cause them herbicide injury can cause them but even just stressful growing conditions can cause tubers to crack. And all it is it's just those tubers are growing so fast those cells are just growing so fast that when they get disrupted and they stop growing all of a sudden you kind of get this line of this area where it didn't continue to grow and so something like this a deeper crack like this probably happened early on in the growing season because as a tuber continued to grow that crack got deeper and deeper. Common scab is something I see a lot of pictures from from home gardeners and common scab can take a lot of forms. And so this disease is common in almost all soils. It varies a lot from year to year. And so it can be very subtle like these pictures show or it can be a lot more pronounced. And so on these pictures you can see actually can look almost like a boil or we can have what's called pitted scab on the right. So it can go into the tuber. And so scabs pretty ugly nobody likes to see it but the good thing about it is you can just cut it off if you don't like the way it looks and the rest of the tuber is just fine. And even with most potato issues and diseases they're not gonna harm you. You can eat the tubers and you can just cut it off if you don't like it. So some comments on common scabs and things you can do to help prevent common scab is you wanna maintain good soil moisture especially during that early tuber bulking. And so tubers will start setting usually around about 40 to 45 days after planting. And so maintaining good soil moisture at that point on is really important. Avoiding manures. Manures have been shown when you add manure to fields or growing areas of potatoes that can increase the chances of scab. If you're trying to adjust your pH by increasing it lime has also been shown to increase scab. Soil rotation is very important. Don't plant potatoes in the same spot in your garden every year. Try to do about a three to four year rotation and that's gonna help. And then also choosing varieties that tend to have scab resistance. And so there's a lot of varieties that may say they have resistance to scab and you might find a lot of scabs sometimes in your potatoes but it's based on where those potatoes were bred and tested at. So maybe in that area they were resistant to scab but you have a different species of scab maybe in your soil sometimes. So some suggestions here to improve potato production. Again, use a rotation three to four years. Use certified seed. Don't use seed from the grocery store because if it's sprout inhibitors on it don't save your seed because you're gonna just basically be causing a domino effect of problems. So just not using manure or compost because that can increase scab. Use adequate fertilizer and keep your soils moist. As far as eating potatoes, like I said just cut off the undesirable parts and we don't wanna eat green potatoes because they heckin' have salt in them which could get you maybe a tummy ache or make you not feel good. So if you wanna know more about potatoes there's a great website potatogoodness.com. There's a lot of fun recipes on there. There's more information on potatoes, on the nutritional value of them. This is put on by Potatoes USA which is a national organization that is here to promote potatoes. They actually have a chef they hire that comes up with fun dishes on how to cook and prepare potatoes. So that's my 20 minutes and I hope you enjoy growing potatoes this year and I'm happy to help answer any questions that anybody might have. Okay, thanks, Annie, great. Here's we've got some questions already coming in. Excellent. Here we go. Do you have any tips about growing them in pots or bags? All right, what kind of tips I guess could you be a little bit more clear? The bigger the pot, the better. Okay, yeah, exactly. How about that? Yeah, bigger the pot, the better would be good. The other thing would be too is if you're on a pot don't let it get too hot. Potatoes are cool season crops so don't just let them sit on like a South porch. That may not be good. Yeah, I wonder how economic it is to grow potatoes in a pot compared to other vegetables. Would you grow them in a five gallon bucket? A lot of container gardens here. You could if you wanted to, just make sure you got, I'd say make sure you got some good holes and drainage in there so you don't overwater them and get them too wet, so. Got some advice on controlling potato beetles, Andy? Yeah, that's a good question. So rotation's gonna help you because they're gonna overwinter and they're gonna crawl out the next year to try to find potatoes, but it probably won't help you, I guess, a lot in the garden. I think there might be, I've talked to my entomologist friends, that I think there's one product that can be used, like you can pick up at Home Depot that might help control them. Spinel said. Vacuum, yeah, spinel said. I've seen them make vacuums, taking vacuums out, yeah, big vacuums to suck them up. I mean, that's an option. But yeah, beetles are a tough one, so. Yeah, they've developed resistance to seven, looks like the carbaryl and. Oh yeah, they're the poster child for resistance. Yeah. Oh, okay. There's a lot of questions, like you said. Yeah. Have you ever thought about, like some people plant their potatoes on top of the soil and then they cover it with hay or mulch? What do you think about that? I don't know, I've never done that before. So, you know, I think you wanna maintain good moisture if you do that, but I don't know. Okay. Does flower color relate to skin color? Not always, nope. So I've seen purple flowers that are rusted potatoes, white flowers that are rusted potatoes, so it's often close, but not always. I've seen purple flowers that are white-chipping potatoes, so. You know, why do the potatoes sometimes curl berries? So that's this natural way of reproducing. So when that pollen in the flower, you know, you get the pollen in the flower, basically it makes a berry, which is full of seeds. So you could actually take that berry and harvest out 200 seeds. The problem is we don't use potato seeds because potatoes are what we call a tetraploid. So you've got four sets of chromosomes. So when those mix, you never know what you're gonna get with that seed, but you can take it and grow it and see what you get for fun. That's what a plant breeder would do, huh? Exactly, that's exactly what plant breeders do. Are those berries edible? Probably wouldn't try those because pretty much everything on the potato plant is gonna have the glycolytes in them, except the tubers, it's plant self-defense, right? They're trying to prevent other things from eating them. Okay, here's another question. What do you do about white grubs that eat on the tubers? White grubs, you know? Yeah, that's a good question. That's like a Jen Kenoba question that's going on. But usually that happens when it's turf and they dig up the turf and then the first year you got grubs in a... Yeah, yeah, and I've seen even with like, you get those like those black click beetles that we call them wireworms. Sometimes even putting other potatoes, old potatoes by your crop, maybe you can use them as a trap, you know, before your potatoes start setting tubers. I've heard of people doing that. But I don't know the best way to control that. How about hollow heart? How can we control that? Okay, so hollow heart is typically associated with kind of like you grow fast and you stop growth and you grow fast again. So the best thing to do is to try to maintain good, even growing conditions. So that's maintaining good soil moisture and good fertility is gonna help you a lot with that. The other thing too is if your tubers are really big, the bigger tubers tend to have hollow heart. So try to decrease your spacing. Try to plant them closer together. That might also help. Okay, Andy, good. How about when this gardener stores their potatoes, when should they remove the vines? They're storing about two to three weeks before you want to harvest them. I would say. Yeah, sometimes you can even let the frost naturally kill your vines and that's not a problem. As long as you don't have a hard frost that gets the soil frozen. So usually if you're above 25 degrees, it doesn't get into the soil very much, unless you have a long period of time. But yeah, so what you're doing, basically you're trying to stop that plant from growing. And so those cells on the outside of the plant they just kind of die and just kind of harden and that's gonna help set the tubers' skin so it doesn't rip, or tear when you dig them out. You know, store better. Do you have a recommendation for what's the best way to store potatoes? Yeah, the best thing to do is you really want to try to keep the temperature cooler and try to keep the humidity up. So the old cellars, you know, are perfect for potatoes. You know, when we store them, we really, depending on what you're trying to do with it, right? If you have a red potato, you can probably store them at 38 to 40 degrees and try to keep the humidity up, you know, around 90% if possible. If it's a russet and you don't want it, and you want it to kind of be more starchy like it is, you probably only want to get it down to about 50 degrees. And again, try to maintain as much humidity as you possibly can. That'll help them store longer. And keep it dark, huh? Yep, and dark, certainly. Yeah, you know, I'm getting green. I just, I just take a, when I do a home, I just take a potato sack and just sort of the top of the box even if it's in a room because it keeps them dark, so. Okay, that's good. Do you have a good variety for storage? What's your favorite? It probably depends on, I guess, what color you want to grow if it's a red variety. If you can find the variety, Stangry, S-A-N-G-R-E, it tends to have better dormancy than a red Norlin does. If you're growing a Burbank potato, a russet Burbank is actually really good. It's very dormant. So those are a couple of ones. Yellow ones are a little bit harder to find yellow varieties that are very dormant. They tend to not have a lot of dormancy to them. Got a question here. Do you have any tips about how to start eye growth in the spring for planting? How we'll have to start eye growth, yeah. So to basically to break dormancy. Yeah, so the easiest thing to do is actually warm up your potatoes. So they're a living organism again, right? And so with more heat, it's going to increase the metabolism and the processes within that tuber. So you can just take them, if you've got, I don't know where you're getting them at, but just bring them home and just put them in room temperature and just keep them dark. And you can just like put them in a box or bag in the corner of a room and just keep an eye on them. And you'll see those eyes start to peep pretty quick if it's warm. I guess the one thing to be cautious about too is sometimes seed can be treated or potatoes can be treated with a sprout inhibitor. And that's why I don't recommend buying seed at a grocery store and trying to plant that because it often has a sprout inhibitor to keep those sprouts from growing. And so sometimes if it's not growing, that could be a possibility. It might have could have been exposed, maybe unintentionally, but it could have been exposed to a sprout inhibitor. Okay, how about what's the best potato for making lefse? That's a Julie Gardner question. I don't know, sorry. Yeah, I have no idea. I'm not a cook, unfortunately. So, do you have any comment between like having a sandy soil versus a heavy soil? What are some issues as far as you have to fertilize more in a sandy soil or do you plant deeper in one or the other? Yeah, so sandy soils are nice for potatoes because they're gonna really allow those tubers to really expand and grow well. But like you said, the disadvantage is your fertility is gonna tend to kind of leach out in the bottom easier. And so you're gonna have to stay on top and water. You're gonna have to maintain better watering practices whereas a heavier soil that might have more clay or low minute, it'll hold on to the nutrients better, it'll hold on to the water better. So yeah, I think you just, you gotta manage them differently depending on what you're doing. Most of our red potatoes are typically grown in the heavier soils and then most of the rest that's are grown in the sand, your soils is what we see from large acreage, so. Yeah, how about, is there a general rule of guide for plant spacing in the role? Like how far do you should you plant the seeds apart from each other? Sure, yeah. Yeah, so if you're growing a red potato like a red norlin, you're probably gonna be about nine inches apart in the row from seed to seed. If it's a rust, it may be 12 inches. And then usually if we're doing multiple rows, it's common to have them about three feet apart the rows. Because it's nice if you can, if we can cover the whole row and shade it because that's gonna actually keep the temperature lower on the tubers and it's gonna help you maintain your moisture. Okay, Andy, your passion is potatoes. Does that include sweet potatoes? Do you have any general comments about sweet potatoes? We don't really deal with many sweet potatoes here. They're difficult to grow, so sorry. Sweet potatoes, even though it says potatoes, they're botanically way different than Irish potatoes. Yeah, okay. Is there really a difference in the taste between a home-grown potato and a store-bought potato? I don't know. It's probably, my guess would be it's probably variety. It's probably based on the variety. There are thousands of potato varieties out there. And so if you're buying a potato in a grocery store compared to a potato in your garden, it's probably really hard to say it's exact same variety. But as far as taste goes, it could be based on the soil you're growing it in, how it was grown, I don't know. But if you like the flavor of your garden potatoes, I say go for it, you know? Grow those. Okay, how about do purple potatoes have higher antioxidants? I think they do, but I'm not 100% sure. It probably would again depend on the variety. There's a lot of varietal differences. Yeah, it is true. And it's anthocyanins, which are a component of antioxidants. How about Andy, how about, do you have a favorite variety of purple potato? What do you think about purple potatoes? How come we don't grow that many of them? Yeah, they're more of a specialty potato. I think they don't taste quite as good, you know, as some of the yellows and reds that are out there. And so they're more grown for restaurants, for presentation is what I would think. And a lot of times, even when you grow them and try to mash them, they turn gray. So I guess if you wanna have a gray mashed potato, it's kind of fun. But a lot of these colored potatoes, actually when you boil them or cook them, they'll actually bleed out their colors. And so it's hard for them to maintain them. It's disgusting. We do variety trials on it. And people say, like some people refuse to eat them. You see, they ruin their roast and they, there's, you know, just, but, when a potato plant blooms, should you remove the flowers or does it make a difference? I don't, it doesn't make a difference really. I think they're fun to look at. They're pretty. Okay. How many hours of sun do potatoes need in the garden? Well, most of the, I mean, most of the potatoes we grow here are gonna have a longer day than the night, you know? So they'll get thrown off. There's some South American varieties I've seen grown actually in North Dakota, where our sunlight is too long and they won't set tubers. But yeah, there's not a, you'll be fine in the summer here because our days are plenty long. I wouldn't be worried about that. Are you aware of any low glycemic varieties? I don't know any off the top of my head. Sorry. I think there's one from South Dakota State. It's Huckleberry Gold. Is that sound right? Huckleberry Gold? It's got gold and gold flesh inside in a purple. I think that, yeah. I think that actually comes out of Idaho that variety. Idaho? Yeah. Okay. What causes, well, what causes brown streaks and potatoes? A lot of things. That's a good answer. If, yeah, if you have a specific question, then either you can send me a picture or tell them a picture or, you know, if it's something you see a lot, we can always send it to a diagnostic lab to get a test. But yeah, it could be diseases, it could be all kinds of things, right? Or it could be injuries. So. Yeah. How about, Andy, are you a fan of the ketchup and French fry potato? That's a tomato plant that's grafted on top of a potato. I really haven't worked with those that much. So it's hard to say. Oh, really? Well, I mean, you're probably competing, right? You're competing for energy to grow the potatoes and the tomatoes. So I don't know how that would compare to, you know, potato plant alone and tomato plant alone. Oh, you mean there's no commercial growers of that? No. No, really. Tomatoes and potatoes. No, it's a gardening thing. It's garbage. That's what it is. Well, you've got two plants competing for the same thing, right? It's better to plant a tomato and plant a potato. Yeah. And you'll be better off. That's like negative synergism when they plant them together. It's a gimmick. We get a lot of gimmicks this time of year for gardeners. Can you do onions and potatoes store together? Sure, yeah, you can store them together. Potatoes might get a little onion flavor, but yeah. Tastes good. How about do you have anything about beneficial plants with potatoes? Like, do they get along with the special other type of vegetable better? Or do they have plants they don't get along with? Not that I know of. I know some guys that will intercede legumes in their potatoes to help get the nitrogen. So you could put, you know, you could plant some beans or something maybe, but again, you're going to be competing for the same water nutrients. But yeah. Yeah, maybe like stay away from the same family, like tomatoes and potatoes. Oh, yeah. Just break up the family a little bit there. Yeah, because you're going to have the same diseases attacking both of them. So yeah. And another, there's sweet potato lovers out here. Can you grow them in North Dakota successfully? I'll say yes. I've talked to several. It's not easy, but you can do it. And the best idea is start your sweet potatoes right now and make your own slips. That's the key to success. And generate as much heat as you can, because like Andy says, a sweet potato is not an Irish potato. They're very different. And let's see what else. You talked about cutting potatoes for planting. Black scurf, anything about black scurf you want to mention? Well, black scurfs on the outside of the tuber. So you can just peel it off. If you don't like it, you can eat it too. It's not going to hurt you. The potatoes in the Red River Valley taste as good as the ones out here in the West. Probably not. I don't know. I don't know. But the one thing I do know is the color tends to stay. The reds tend to have. They just have this. They maintain a much deeper red color through the year. Where's that? In the Red River Valley. Do they? Yeah. Yeah, if you're on kind of more of a sandier soil, they tend to wash out. They're going to wash out more. We don't know exactly why that is, but we just see it all the time. So there's a question about organic ways to control insects or pests. And I think that's been all said is that, well, that's organic. That's an organic product. That's the way to go. Uncle Jackson's organic. The vacuum's organic. Very gold chickens. Chickens organic. Ducks. Yeah, there's options, right? So that's always the goal about that. OK, last question. Well, it's about sweet potatoes. Yeah, you can go with sweet potatoes indoors under light, but I don't know. I mean, yeah. I know there's some commercials. I say I know there's some commercial sweet potatoes growing in Wisconsin, but that's about as far north as I've ever heard it. And I don't know how well they do, but it's tough. It's like trying to grow a plant that needs a lot of heat in an environment really that doesn't have a lot of the heat in right conditions. So it's a challenge. But if you can do it successfully, hey, my hat's off to you. That's great. That's right. OK, so you know what? Can you use garden compost to top off, to put on top of potatoes? I don't see why not. I think it would be in that garden compost to probably, again, you probably want to try to stay away from compost and maybe tomatoes, peppers, the same species, because you're probably going to have a little bit more disease incidents if you do that, because you're going to have the same species. OK, last question. How about you talk about don't eat green potatoes? Well, how much green can you allow for before you get that tummy ache you talk about? Yeah, it's probably not going to kill you. And in the UK, they've actually they've kind of gone trying to encourage people to eat a little bit of green potatoes, so you're not wasting so much. But I just kind of, I tend to be more on the safe side and try to stay away from it. And the big thing to stay away from would be those sprouts, those potatoes start sprouting. Those sprouts actually have the highest concentration in them, because you think about those sprouts are trying to grow, they're very young, they're very delicate. And so the potato plant is trying to protect itself against predators and eating it. So definitely cut sprouts off. But yeah, try to keep the green off just to be safe, I think, because this is just the way to go just to play it safe. Because potatoes are really inexpensive. It's just not worth it to get sick over. So that's right. Let the British eat at that. That's ridiculous. When in doubt, toss it out. OK, that was great. That was a great start to our year of spring fever garden forum talks. And thank you so much. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you.