To save you some time, it’s a stupid idea to plant russet potatoes in the South. That’s all this post is about. Thus showing, once again, that the most important step in gardening is growing the right varieties of plants.
Edit: Also see also Post G23-041, on the poor yield of all varieties with this method.
I tried growing no-dig potatoes using leaf mulch this year. Three varieties, planted with minimal effort on 3/17/2023 (Post G23-016).
Why three? That’s what my local Whole Foods had, in terms of bags of full-sized organic potatoes. The thinking didn’t go an inch deeper than that. (Of grocery-store potatoes, only organic potatoes are guaranteed not to have been sprayed with a potent sprouting inhibitor (Post G22-004).
Potatoes aren’t very happy in the South in the best of times, as evidenced by this table of commercial potato growing states.
Source: Potatopro.com
Apparently that goes double for russets. This site specifically mentions that they are a poor choice for Florida (reference). The University of Georgia Extension Service has this to say:
The thick, russet-skinned potatoes sold in the grocery store do not grow well in the South and should be avoided.
Why? Russets need about four months from emergence of the shoots to full maturity. Around here, that’s five months from time of planting. Which means that russets in this zone would not be ready to harvest until mid-August. Which ain’t gonna happen, as the summer heat around here would have killed them long before that.
If you plant russets in the South, you should expect a small harvest of immature potatoes. That’s your best-case scenario, apparently.
I’d call that an accurate description of my harvest this year, as pictured above. Consistent with their generally poor growth, after harvesting them today, I doubt that I got much more than the weight of the original seed potatoes back, in terms of edible russet potatoes.
The upshot is that this is a failure, but not necessarily a failure of no-dig planting using leaf mulch. The russets were on a fast-track to failure in any case, because they are ill-suited to my warm climate.
The red and gold potatoes that I planted at the same time as the russets are still hanging in there. Looks like they’ve got another couple of weeks to go. We’ll see whether or not I get a decent harvest there, or whether the whole concept of no-dig potatoes using leaf mulch needs to be re-thought.
