A Gardeners Forum Forums Gardening Reference Gardening in 2006 potatoes

Hello I am wondering if there is anything I can do to stop my potatoes from growing so tall. They are just begining to flower but they are now around 4 ft tall and growing. My neighbours are only a couple feet tall but mine are going crazy. Is this normal , I know I have really good soil as everything else is surpaseing my neighbours stuff too. It is a new garden area and we used good clean steer manure.I dont use chemicals just a lot of tlc . thnks

Welcome! Sounds like you're gonna have a bumper harvest. You can certainly prune the plants if you want to, but that will more than likely impede the growing spuds' progress if you remove a great deal of foliage. What's your reasoning for wanting to control further vertical growth?

Why would you want to stop you potato plants from getting taller? You can get more potatoes from a larger plant! As it gets taller, hill the soil up around it, so it's deeper... potatoes will develop between where the roots start, clear up to the soil line, if you keep hilling up as it grows.

Maybe the reason your neighbor has smaller plants is because your soil is richer. potatoes just love high levels of nitrogen & potassium, & apparently that's what you've given them by amending the soil with steer manure.

Sounds great to me! Good luck! (Got pictures?)

Welcome to the forum, by the way! TLC works wonders in gardens... we'd like to hear more about what's growing in yours! This place is full of friendly people who are willing to help (& we're always looking for help with our gardens, too)... maybe you have some ideas & gardening experiences that you'd care to share with us. We're just like 1 big family & look forward to getting to know you better!

Hi I have been hilling around them for the last week , and we even added about 14 inches of soil around the plants because we heard that helped , The only reason that I wanted to keep them a little shorter is that they are taking over the garden . It seems as though I will live with there height because I love my potatoes . This is one of our first gardens and it is really cool because my neighbour is avid gardener and he cant beleave how well we are doin. Thankyou for your help and happy growing to all

Hilling potatoes should cease once the plant gets to a foot to 14" tall or so. I've normally placed my seed in 8" deep holes, covered them and continued to hill them until they get a few inches above the soil line. After that you can just mulch the area around the plants so none of the tubers poke through the soil and turn green.

Sounds great on your potatos. Mine are over 2 feet tall and are starting to die. Today my wife said "we have any taters" I said not store bought but I can get some from the garden. dug up 2 plants and got like 10 taters so that was good. I have like 40 more plants in the garden.

:-))))))

Of course it helped that I had like a foot + roots growing out of the taters that I planted 2 months ago. I guess thats what happens when you leave them in a cool dark place for a few months.

I dug mine a couple of weeks ago and got about 50#.

They sure are good!!!