Organic Gardening: Good Reasons to Grow Your Own Potatoes

Almost everyone who grows any vegetables at all will have at least one tomato plant. We grow tomatoes even if we only have space for a pot on our patio. And it makes sense - the cardboard-textured balls in the grocery store are expensive, and tasteless. Since they're easy to grow, and a home-grown fruit is bursting with real tomato flavor that you can't get any other way, no one would argue against growing a few.

However, the potato, a close relative of the tomato plant, is often left out of our gardens, because this staple food crop can be purchased so cheaply at the store. Many people have never tasted a home-grown potato, and have no idea that they could taste any different from the ones you buy for a few dollars in the ten-pound sack. But they do taste different, believe me. Plus, potatoes come in an astounding variety of colors, shapes, sizes and tastes, but only a few of them ever show up in your local supermarket.

Most commercially grown potatoes are grown on large farms, where pesticides are used liberally. One recent study found that the US potato crop uses almost sixty million pounds of pesticides each year. Some of those pesticides are known carcinogens. The Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP) reported that more pesticides were used on potatoes in 1996 than on any other crop grown in the Northwest, where the majority of the countries potatoes are grown. Potatoes ranked 5th nationally in overall pesticide use - the only crops ahead of spuds were corn, soybeans, cotton and grapes.

The only way to avoid ingesting these chemicals, some of which are known to affect the endocrine system, the reproductive system and male fertility, is to buy locally grown organic potatoes, or grow your own.

And one last argument in favor of the lowly spud in your garden - I know they take up a lot of space, but they also make up a large part of most American diets. This is a good thing, since the potato is filled with nutrients and relatively low in calories, if you leave off the butter and gravy. I get a huge thrill out of walking into my June garden and digging up the two to four pounds of fresh, new Yukon gold spuds from under one potato plant. Later on, I'll dig my main crop to eat through the winter. Every time I use a potato from my own garden, I am avoiding a trip to the store. Not making that trip saves me a lot of money, because I avoid the temptation of putting other, more expensive items in my cart while I'm there.

Each year as my garden year ends, my only regret is that I didn't plant more potatoes.

Growing them is easy. Simply mix a complete organic fertilizer into the soil of a long row, and then make a trench about 8 inches deep. If you have any comfrey, throw some leaves in the bottom of the trench to add the potassium and micro nutrients that really make potatoes thrive. Then drop in your seed potato and cover with a few inches of soil. As the leaves emerge, use your hoe to continue covering the plants, leaving a few leaves open to the sun each time. In a few weeks your trench will be filled in, and the plants will be creating as many as four pounds of good, nutritious food from every seed potato you planted. It almost feels like magic. If you use a fast-maturing variety, you can plant your main crop of keepers in July.