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00:00Another day in the garden, another day loving potatoes like my life depends on it.
00:05I've grown so many potatoes in so many different ways in my life that I even tried to live off of them five years ago,
00:11eating them in my front yard and losing about 12 pounds of muscle in the process.
00:14Didn't really work out, but I did grow a lot of potatoes and that's what we're going to show you how to do in today's video.
00:19But I need to summon a little help from a potato farmer friend of mine, Potato Ty.
00:25Whoa. Oh, that actually worked.
00:27Kevin, Ty, I hear you need some help this year with your potatoes.
00:30I need help and they need help.
00:32Let's show you guys how to grow the best crop of potatoes in your life.
00:36Ty, your family's grown billions of pounds of potatoes over 104 years, so why don't you take the first hack?
00:41Yeah, I got this, Kev.
00:42This first hack could be the difference between feast or famine, and that's what variety of potato you're growing.
00:48You see, my family has been farming potatoes for five generations,
00:52and what we found is the best variety to grow for yield wise is yellow potatoes.
00:56We grow a variety called Agada, and that allows us to grow 70,000 pounds of potatoes per acre,
01:03where other varieties we only get around 30,000 to 40,000 pounds.
01:07This potato plant right here is a yellow potato, and if you want to maximize your yield,
01:12I suggest growing a variety called Agada, where it also maximizes the storage length as well.
01:18This is a really important potato hack if you're wanting to maximize the growth in your garden,
01:23but if you just want to be a lazy grower, this next potato hack is for you.
01:27Like Ty said, if you want a method that grows potatoes pretty much on autopilot with no real work from you,
01:33this is the hack for you. You just need something to cover your potato up with.
01:37So there was a woman almost a hundred years ago now named Ruth Stout.
01:41She had a book that came out called Ruth Stout's Easy No Work Garden,
01:44and she became famous for her very efficient way of growing.
01:49She didn't weed. She didn't water. She really didn't do almost anything.
01:53And specifically with potatoes,
01:55what she would do is she would walk around and she would just drop potatoes on the ground like this and she would use hay.
02:02And she'd cover her potatoes up with about two, three feet of hay, just like this.
02:08Maybe she'd water it once or twice, but that's about it. And then that is it.
02:12She didn't bury the potatoes. She didn't hill the potatoes.
02:15She just let them grow like this. And we tested it.
02:18Jack Jacques last season gave this a shot and he had some beautiful, beautiful potatoes.
02:22And the craziest part is you just brush the straw aside and boom,
02:26the potatoes are growing almost in midair, not buried whatsoever.
02:30So try this tip out if you want a very easy way to grow potatoes this season.
02:34But if you want to boost your yields and speed up your growth, Ty's got the next one for you.
02:39This next tip isn't a greenhouse, but it has the same effect as a greenhouse.
02:44This is row cover.
02:46So our family for the last 50 years has been growing the first potatoes in Canada and it's all because of this stuff.
02:52We put this row cover over our potatoes right away once it's planted.
02:57In Canada, we're actually able to plant our potatoes in February and be one of the first ones to harvest in May because of this stuff.
03:05It acts as a greenhouse, allowing the potatoes to get a lot more heat and moisture so they grow a lot quicker.
03:10We actually grow potatoes in less than 80 days with this method and have been the first ones in all of Canada every year to have fresh potatoes.
03:20But there's another hack that allows you to grow your potatoes a lot quicker.
03:23So if you want to speed your potato sprouting up, you got to get into chitting yourself.
03:28I don't like the word either, guys. I don't know why. I think it's a British thing.
03:32So consider how you name things, guys. It's really just a potato sprouting itself, right?
03:37So this is what you're looking at. I've got the Kev potato here. This is an unchitted potato, right?
03:42Very handsome though. This one, however, has some things growing out of it.
03:46These are the potato sprouts coming out of the potato eyes.
03:50And so take a look at this, this, this and this. This would be called like the rose side of the potato.
03:56It's where most of the small eyes are forming. And this is what comes out of those eyes.
04:01If I plant this potato or I plant this potato, this one's going to grow a lot faster, but I got to get it to this point first.
04:06So what you need to do is when you get your seed potatoes, they might even come chitted, but they may not.
04:12And if they don't, you want to put them in a tray, something like this, maybe windowsill, indirect light,
04:17not super warm, not super cold, just kind of moderate temperatures.
04:21And you'll start to see these sprout. And this is a really good size, a half inch to an inch, any longer.
04:25And when you plant it, you can actually break the sprout off.
04:28And this of course is what's going to be growing upwards to come out of the soil.
04:32And the potatoes will be kind of growing in between the seed potato and where it comes out of the soil.
04:37So this is very important and it'll speed your growth of a potato up by a considerable amount of time.
04:42So always chit your potatoes. And if you want to multiply your harvest, well, my boy Ty has got you covered.
04:49This next tip really does matter at every scale, whether it's commercial farming or gardening,
04:55and that's what size your seed needs to be when you plant it.
04:59You see, this is about eight ounces of potatoes.
05:02And what our farm has found is that really for optimal yield, you want to be planting around three ounces.
05:09So what do you do when your potato seed is large?
05:12Well, it's actually a-okay to cut your potato seed in half.
05:16In fact, it's really encouraged.
05:19Say that this eight ounces of potato seed might get you seven pounds of potatoes.
05:24But if you split these up and plant them apart from each other, you'd get over 10 pounds of potatoes from this.
05:31So if you're like me and you don't like wasting potatoes, then you're going to want to cut your potato seed in half.
05:36And this next tip is going to be the mecca for making sure that you can enjoy potatoes year round.
05:41If you're looking to maximize the yield of your spuds, another thing you can do is understand the type that you're growing.
05:46And I'm not talking yellow, red or white.
05:48I'm talking about determinate and indeterminate potatoes.
05:53You know, when you hear those words as a gardener, you usually think tomatoes.
05:56But the truth is they're related to potatoes.
05:59And potatoes exhibit some of the same growing characteristics.
06:02So if you have a determinate potato, like say a Yukon Gold is a good example.
06:07Beautiful, classic potato.
06:09What that's going to do is as you plant it in the ground, maybe say six inches deep, in about 70 to 90 days,
06:15all those potatoes are going to kind of cluster right around where that seed potato was planted.
06:20And that's going to be called an early crop or an early season potato.
06:23Oftentimes you can even harvest those as a new potato.
06:26But then you've got something like a russet burbank, which would be what's called an indeterminate potato.
06:32What happens there is that season extends a bit, 90 to 120 days.
06:37And they will grow around the seed potato where it's planted.
06:40But also they will start to shoot a lot of growth off as the season extends upwards,
06:46which is why it's often recommended to hill your potatoes.
06:49But what I would say is definitely hill an indeterminate potato because it really needs it.
06:54That season and the way that it grows kind of requires soil to be around it.
06:58So if you're a container gardener, it actually is a really good idea to take like a five gallon bucket,
07:03drill some holes in it, throw a few inches of soil down, drop an indeterminate variety in.
07:08And as it grows, just dump a little bit of soil in it.
07:10At the end of the season, you'll have this big old bucket.
07:12And when you dump that out, there'll be potatoes covering it from top to bottom.
07:16So know your potato type, but no matter what type you're growing,
07:19there's a few things you can do to make sure that they last.
07:22So this next hack is one of the most common mistakes that I see and that is skin set.
07:27Normally you need to make sure that your potato plant has been dead for two to four weeks for the skin to properly develop.
07:34However, our farm is actually very innovative on this.
07:37Oftentimes we have to harvest our potatoes early and we don't have time to wait for the potato to die.
07:43So our hack is actually cutting the potato plant and making it die.
07:49Our farm uses a massive machine to cut the tops of the potato plants and force them to die.
07:54So the energy goes towards developing the potato skin and not growing up the potato plant.
08:00So for the home gardener, this tip will allow you to enjoy potatoes for the rest of the year.
08:04And this next tip, for the rest of your life.
08:06I want to grow potatoes for the rest of my life.
08:09That means avoiding some of the more common problems that they can run into with a clever hack that actually you see at a farming level more than a gardener's level.
08:16This is one of the most important things that we do as farmers and that's disease prevention.
08:21And the best way to do that is cover cropping.
08:23So I have a little four by eight humble bed here, not 600 acres like Ty's farming on.
08:27And the thing is cover cropping as a gardener sometimes seems a little extra, a little fancy, but it's actually really simple.
08:33Let's say I grew potatoes in this bed last season, Ty.
08:36I might cover crop it in the fall, let it kind of go.
08:39I might move my potatoes here next season, grow something else here.
08:42And I can just go back and forth over the season.
08:44As a gardener, that's probably good enough.
08:46For sure. And as a farmer, we're always looking at more innovative and regenerative ways to make sure that we can grow a crop.
08:51And cover cropping is one of the best ways to reduce the chemicals that you're spraying on the potatoes to reduce diseases.
08:57So you just don't have to worry about, is it safe? Is it not?
09:00Grab a pack, sprinkle it on. You're good to go.
09:02So these are some awesome hacks to grow potatoes, but some things that you think are potato hacks, aren't.
09:08So in this video, Ty and I bust some of the most commonly believed potato myths.
09:12Check it out. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.