Potatoes need a specific number of daylight hours in order to produce tubers.

One is a mid season and the other late season. Now September 26th I believe I'll hit 12/12 light. Do they have to be over the 12 hour mark?

Rough estimate would be they would finish in early to mid November. Too late?

1. I'm not sure if they can be pulled and planted as quickly as you infer.
2. I think you have time to get at least a small harvest (but that is what you already have,not sure what you would gain)
3. Personally, I would just let them grow and harvest at the end of the season.
4. "Question is do potatoes need a cold period or dormancy in order to sprout? " ....Cold...No...Dormancy...Perhaps, I can't remember what I heard about that....they need something....???

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Many let the tubers rest for a while to stabilize starches, not sure if its necessary. But spuds need a particular photoperiod pattern, and now with days shortening not sure what kind of tiny little potatoes you'll get. No harm in throwing a couple out there and seeing what happens, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.

Dan

Okay thanks all for the info. Think I'll wait till next year.

Last year I must have had 20 to 25 volunteer potato plants where I had them the year befor. So I dug them up and moved them to where I put the new bed. They did good after replanting.

So last fall while digging up the taters I thought, " hmmm I had so many volunteers so why not just plant them now". So thats what I did, dug a trench and put my taters in and buried them. They came up great, have lots of bulbs and lots of foliage. Should be a good harvest. So from now on, I will be planting my taters in the fall. That way I wont have to look all over for seed, with the possiblity of not getting what I want.

makete - do you mean they come up in the spring?

I've been considering the same thing...but can't find seed potatoes to try it with, at least not online. I suppose I could try organic grocery store taters or what? Good luck with whatever you try. For myself, it would be SO much more convenient to have two times a year to plant them but I really have no idea what to try at this point.
Angie

Hi angiemomma,
It takes about 90 days,give or take (mostly give ;-)
to get a good harvest, so if you are able to do what I do (utilizing some frost protection at the beginning and the end of the process (April and October can get a little frosty)

Plant as early as you can in April, and your second batch goes in about July.

If that doesn't work for you, you can spread out your harvests by planting your first in May and starting a new batch 30 days later, and then a new batch 30 days after that.

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What I did was plant the smaller taters and odd shaped/damaged that I found while digging them up last fall. I had no need to buy seed as I already had them.

"makete - do you mean they come up in the spring?"

Yes my volunteers came up last spring where the tater bed was the year befor. Thats what gave me the idea of " why cant I just plant them now if they did so good on their own ".

I appears that I will get a pretty good harvest so I will continue to do it again this fall.

I am going to echo the sentiment of a couple of others. I have a "perennialized" potato patch that is on its third growing season, and will be going into its third autumn/winter cycle. They do great. The reason I never harvested them all the first year was that most are fingerling/miniature types, and I found it impossible and pointless to pick up all of those tiny tubers. So I left them, and threw mulch deeply over the bed, as it also is a large daffodil patch (they work together well, by the way, the daffs emerge and bloom, and then the potato foliage covers the dying daffodil foliage). When they all emerged healty and vigorous the next spring, I left them. Last fall, I did the same, only harvesting the larger, nicer tubers and leaving the "runts". This year again, they were very early and nice.

I'm going to actually plant two more areas of perennialized potatoes, and see what happens.

Question for jonehughes -- From where did you get your purple potato seed? I planted purple potatoes from Trader Joe's and got nothing (many possible reasons for this, I know, including dormancy spray, or that I might have the wrong climate -- but they never, ever even pre-sprouted).

I would love to give purple potatoes a shot, if I knew where to buy the seed. I live in southern California.

Burpee..... Link Below ;-)

Here is a link that might be useful: Purple Potatoes from Burpee

So denninmi, you harvest a few potatoes from under the plants after the foliage dies back, or do you pull a few whole plants? How deep do you have to mulch them so that the underground tubers don't freeze?

makete - if you're in the UP, those potatoes must have gone through a pretty stiff winter before they came up.

I may give this a try. I always prepare my potato bed in the fall because the ground is too muddy to work in spring.

I always have volunteer spuds from what I miss when digging up. That's the new potatoes that we get to eat in early summer - altho few as they generally are in the way of whatever it is that I planted the following year. Always volunteers in the spring.

Dan