Potatoes are a popular vegetable to grow in home gardens Their versatility and nutrition make them a staple crop for many gardeners. However, potatoes have a reputation for being somewhat confusing to grow Many gardeners wonder – if I miss digging some up, will they come back next year? Do potatoes regrow annually on their own?
The short answer is – potatoes can regrow from tubers left in the ground, but this is not an ideal way to grow them year after year. For best harvests, potatoes should be planted annually from disease-free seed potatoes.
The Life Cycle and Growing Habits of Potatoes
To understand if and how potatoes regrow each year, it’s helpful to look at their natural life cycle and growing habits.
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Potatoes are cool weather crops that originated in the Andes Mountains of South America. They grow best in loose, fertile soil with consistent moisture.
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They are frost tolerant and can withstand light spring frosts. However, tubers are damaged by hard freezes.
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Potatoes grow from seed potatoes, which are small whole potatoes, not actual seeds. Eyes on the seed potato sprout and form new plants.
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Above ground, potatoes produce stems, leaves, flowers and sometimes inedible green tomato-like fruits. Below ground, starchy tubers form on roots stemming from the seed potato.
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Potatoes are considered a perennial, meaning the plant can persist for several years. But most types behave as annuals, dying back each year after flowering and harvest.
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After potatoes are harvested, any tubers accidentally left in the ground may overwinter there. If the ground doesn’t freeze deeply, they can resprout the next spring.
Regrown Potatoes Produce Poorly
While potatoes left in the ground can technically regrow the following year, this is not an ideal way to grow them. There are several issues with relying on regrowth:
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Overwintered tubers may rot, freeze or turn mushy if not stored properly indoors over winter. Damaged tubers don’t regrow well.
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Closely spaced overwintered tubers compete for nutrients and space. This results in poor quality, undersized potatoes.
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Volunteers sprouting from old tubers are more prone to disease. Starting with certified disease-free seed potatoes each year prevents disease build up.
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It’s difficult to find and dig all the overwintered tubers each year. New sprouts pop up all over, creating a mess.
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Tubers left in the ground too long can start sprouting early, shortening their dormant period needed for good yields.
So while volunteer potatoes may come up, harvesting and replanting seed potatoes annually leads to far better harvests in terms of yield, quality and disease prevention.
How to Plant Potatoes Each Year
Growing potatoes as an annual crop from seed potatoes isn’t difficult. Here are some tips for success:
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Choose a sunny spot with loose, fertile soil. Amend clay soils with compost to improve drainage.
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Buy certified disease-free seed potatoes from a garden center or seed catalog. Choose early, mid or late season varieties.
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Cut seed potatoes into smaller chunks, ensuring each piece has 1-2 eyes. Let pieces cure for 1-2 days before planting.
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Plant seed potato chunks 3-6 inches deep, 12-18 inches apart in rows or beds. Space rows 2-3 feet apart.
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Hill soil over stems as they grow, keeping about 2/3 of the plant underground. This allows more tubers to form.
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Water regularly to keep soil evenly moist, especially as tubers start swelling. Avoid waterlogged soil.
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Harvest after vines die back. Carefully dig tubers with a fork, being sure to get them all.
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Cure harvested potatoes in a dark, cool spot for 1-2 weeks to toughen skins for storage.
Can Potatoes Be Grown as Perennials?
Some gardeners enjoy experimenting with unconventional growing methods. Potatoes can be grown as perennials in areas with mild winters where the ground rarely freezes. But this requires more oversight:
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Plant an isolated plot away from annual potato beds to prevent disease spread.
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Hill very deeply over stems to encourage tubers to form as far down as possible.
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Mulch beds very heavily before winter to insulate soil and prevent freezing.
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Expect plants to become crowded and yields to decrease over time as tubers compete.
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Dig out aging tubers and replenish soil nutrients every 2-3 years to reinvigorate the bed.
Growing potatoes as perennials takes extra work and vigilance. The average gardener will find it easier and more productive to replant potatoes annually. But gardeners with the patience and curiosity for experimentation may find perennial potatoes an interesting endeavor.
Key Points to Remember
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Potatoes left in the ground through winter can resprout the following spring. But tubers may rot or freeze over winter.
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Volunteer potato plants often produce small, poor quality tubers. Disease risk is higher.
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For best harvests, grow potatoes as annuals, replanting disease-free seed potatoes each year.
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With extra care, potatoes can be grown as perennials in very mild winter areas. Expect decreasing yields over time.
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No matter how you choose to grow them, potatoes are a fun, versatile crop for any gardener to try. Enjoy the homegrown flavors!
Information I’ve Been Missing
What is the relationship between days to maturity and storage length. Should I simply avoid any potatoes that are considered early (70-90 days) or mid (90-110 days) season if I want my potatoes to store into early spring?
- Yes! The later maturing varieties generally hold their dormancy longer than the early varieties (though dormancy is controlled by a whole host of factors, many of which are weather related and out of the growers hands). So plant early and mid season potatoes for fresh eating and the late maturing ones for longer term storage.
What really is the optimum planting depth and spacing of my potatoes?
- Planting depth: 1 to 4 inches deep (more shallow for colder climates, more deep for southern parts of the US). I’ve been planting my potatoes WAY too deep.
- Plant spacing: 10-12 inches apart, except for fingerlings, which, weirdly, should be 14-18 inches apart. I’ve been planting my potatoes too far apart.
What is the optimum planting time for potatoes in my area?
- When your soil, 4″ down, reaches 50 degrees in the early morning, before the sun warms it up. I find the easiest way to predict soil temperature if you don’t have a thermometer is to use this soil temperature map for your zip code (this site is a GAME CHANGER). For our area, soils reach the 50 degree range in early to mid April. I prefer to plant later because there’s less chance of a hard frost killing off the above ground growth later in the month.
Do determinate vs indeterminate varieties really matter? (I only just learned that potatoes come in determinate and indeterminate types a few years ago, and it seems impossible to find a definitive list of which varieties are which).
- In short, no. Most commercial varieties are determinate (they do all of their growing at once and then die back, rather than continue to put on potatoes throughout the growing season. The key here is that POTATOES ARE A COOL SEASON CROP! When daytime temperatures are over 90 degrees, the plants tend to die regardless of whether they are determinate or indeterminate. So for our area, with its trending hotter longer summers, there’s no point in seeking out indeterminate varieties. I’m also considering throwing a shade cloth over the row as our temperatures start to raise.
What’s with disease issues? Does it really matter if I don’t buy certified seed potatoes every year?
- Potatoes are wildly susceptible to various viruses, spread from plant to plant by insects with piercing sucking mouth parts; most frequently by aphids. As these viruses collect and proliferate in the potato plant, they slowly decrease the yield of the actual potato. Because these viruses accumulate in the potato tuber itself, which is essentially a clone of its parent, planting previous year’s potatoes means you are accumulating more and more virus over time. You may never actually SEE any signs that your potatoes are infected with viruses. You will simply see smaller and smaller potatoes as the years go by. These viruses are harmless to humans.
- Evidently, before tissue culture of seed potatoes became common, some varieties experienced “running out”, where the propagation of the variety did not yield viable sized potatoes due to accumulated viral loads.
- Here’s a bit of a behind the scenes look at how commercial seed potatoes are grown. Seed potatoes are propagated vegetatively rather than from actual seed (you CAN grow potatoes from true seed, but that’s a whole other blog post). The tubers we harvest actually grow out of the plant’s stem, rather than from the roots. Along the stem there are lateral growth points, or buds. Each of these buds has a meristem (a small populations of rapidly proliferating cells that can produce all the adult organs of a flowering plant). Meristems have no vascular system and therefore are less prone to viral, fungal and bacterial infections. These meristems are grown as a tissue culture in a lab until they form small “plantlets”. This tissue is tested repeatedly for disease infection to ensure they are disease free. They are sometimes called pre-nuclear.
- These plantlets (think the size of an alfalfa sprout) are then grown out in greenhouse conditions, where disease spreading insects can be excluded, to grow “mini” tubers. These plants are sometimes referred to as nuclear, and are the most disease free seed tubers you can buy. These mini tubers are then grown out in open field conditions to produce the first generation of “seed” potatoes. Most states limit the number of generations these potatoes can be grown out and sold because each subsequent generation will have more virus accumulation. Higher elevation and colder climate sites have less insect pressure and therefore often have a slower disease build up.
- When you buy seed potatoes, you are normally buying “certified” seed potatoes. While the criteria for this certification differs from state to state, it does ensure that the potatoes you are receiving meet certain criteria for variety, size, are free from various diseases and mechanical damage (though not necessarily viral diseases), and that the specific generation of grow out is included in the information on the box. See HERE for USDA details. Washington Dept. of Ag Certification Program HERE.
Wouldn’t it make sense that the larger the starting tuber, the more potatoes you’d get?
- Yes, you do get more yield when you plant a larger potato, but you also have to buy more seed potatoes to plant the same size patch, as larger potatoes don’t go as far, so its a trade off.
Do I really need to cut up my seeds into individual “eyes”?
- Each “eye” on a potato grows a stem, and that stem creates a whole new plant. Studies have shown that the ideal size “seed” potato is from 1 1/2 to 2 3/4 oz. (About the size of a large chicken egg). So cutting up your larger tubers into approximately 1 1/2 to 2 oz squarish pieces, each with at least one eye, and spreading them out when planting will give you the highest possible yield for the lowest pounds planted. 1 lb of potatoes should plant 8-10 feet.
What is Chitting or Greensprouting and should I do it?
- Greensprouting is the process of waking the potato up from dormancy. To greensprout a potato, warm up the seed potatoes to room temperatures, while keeping the plant in the dark, for 7-10 days. Once sprouts emerge from the eye, expose tubers to light and drop temperatures to 50-55 to slow growth. This process has been shown to cut 10-14 days off of your time to stem emergence once planted. Once the stem has emerged, the plant has a tremendous ability to fight off rot. So greensprouting is definitely a win/win for both disease protection and time to harvest.
When is the optimum time to harvest my potatoes?
- You may have heard that if you see blooms on your plants, there are potatoes forming underneath. This is a critical time for growth of your potatoes and adequate moisture is extra important! You can, of course, reach around under the plant and pick a few ping pong sized potatoes here and there once you see your plants blooming, but they won’t reach optimum size until the plants have died back on their own. This can range from 70 to 130 days depending on the particular variety. So for me, if I plant April 15th, harvest can range from late June to late August. Pay attention to those maturity estimates!
- Even that last week between starting to look sad and fully dead can see a decent increase in tuber size, as the tuber pulls back the energy from the plant into itself. Most importantly, the more fully mature the potatoes are when you harvest them, the longer they will keep in storage! So don’t feel like a bad gardener if you don’t get your potatoes dug right away (if you can keep the gophers from eating them all before you get them out of the ground!)
- Some varieties simply hold dormancy longer than others, due to a whole host of genetic and environmental factors. A few reportedly long storing varieties include:
- All Blue
- Baltic Rose
- Burbank Russet
- Butte Russet
- Elba
- German Butterball
- Katahdin
- Kennebec
- Prairie Blush
- Red Chieftain
- Red Cloud
- Red Pontiac
- Rose Finn Apple Fingerling
- Russian Banana Fingerling
- Sapro Mira
- Yukon Gem
- Yukon Gold
- Your mileage may vary. I have not found All Blue, Red Chieftain or Red Pontiac to do particularly well under my storage conditions.
What IS the ideal way to store potatoes for home use to keep them from sprouting?
- You’ve probably anways heard to NOT refrigerate your potatoes. This is because under refrigerated conditions, some of the starches can turn to sugars, and that increased sugar can cause an unwanted darkening of the potato when its deep fried. I personally wouldn’t care about a color change and rarely deep fry potatoes anyway. This increased sugar does not affect coloration when potatoes are boiled or roasted.
- According to the University of California Davis, 40 degrees F with high humidity and good airflow is the ideal storage condition for fresh eating. Conditions that don’t generally exist on the homestead. I’m starting to think the best answer is to store potatoes in an extra refrigerator in my garage.
My issue is that I don’t have access to large amounts of straw/mulch for inexpensive prices (I plant up to a 100 ft row of potatoes, so I’d need a LOT of mulch, and I’d need to reapply several times during the growing season to prevent green potatoes). The one time I did use straw as a mulch, I germinated about a gazillion weed and grass seeds that became a nightmare to pull out. I love the idea, and if I had a giant pile of mulch to utilize, I’d absolutely give this more of a go. But it does require deep soil fertility to be successful. Potatoes have surprisingly deep roots and are heavy feeders. If the mulch you are planting in isn’t already well composted, your potatoes are gonna be hungry and your yield small.
So there you have it. A much deeper dive into the ins and outs of growing potatoes for long term homestead use. I’ll be doing a better job of selecting my potatoes for an early and then a late harvest this year, and I’ll bite the bullet and go ahead and order seed potatoes through the mail. I’ll likely order from Fedco (they carry close to 50 varieties). I’m looking at Yukon Gem or Caribe for an early variety, perhaps Kauka Gold, Elba and Katahdin for late varieties. I also like Pinto as a fingerling.
© Miles Away Farm 2023, where we’re Miles Away from perfecting our potato growing techniques, but are willing to keep experimenting. Want more content? Sign up for a monthly newsletter to your email inbox HERE
3 Mistakes to avoid when growing potatoes in containers
FAQ
Can I leave potatoes in the ground over winter?
Can you eat potatoes left in the ground over winter?
Unharvested potatoes: Another question surrounding growing potatoes is if they are safe to eat if they were left in the ground over the winter. According to Oregon State University Extension, they are safe as long as they are disease free, firm and the skin is not green.
How many years does the same field get used for growing potatoes?
To help minimize their loss to diseases, farmers usually grow potatoes in each field once in every four years. The three seasons between potato crops allow time for potato-infecting diseases to die out in that field.
Will potatoes come back after winter?
The gardener’s goal is to dig every potato out of the ground at harvest time. Missing a few potatoes is easy to do, and the tubers will overwinter in the soil. If you live in a climate where the soil freezes deeply, these forgotten potatoes will freeze and turn to mush. They will not grow back next year.Oct 18, 2023
Do potatoes return each year?
Let’s take a closer look at the life cycle and growing habits of potatoes to understand if and when they may return each year Potatoes are technically classified as a perennial plant. This means the plant can live for multiple years as opposed to annuals that complete their lifecycle in one season.
Will forgotten potatoes grow back next year?
If you live in a climate where the soil freezes deeply, these forgotten potatoes will freeze and turn to mush. They will not grow back next year. If you live in a climate where the soil does not freeze, or does not freeze down as deep as the potato tubers are, the forgotten potatoes will most likely grow back the following year.
Can you grow potatoes a year after year?
However, most gardeners grow potatoes as an annual crop. This allows for ideal harvests year after year, rather than diminishing returns from overwintered plants. In permaculture gardens or very mild climates, potatoes may be left in the ground to overwinter.
Can potatoes survive a season?
Potatoes are perennial, so in theory the plants can survive for years on end. However, this assumes the proper climate. Potato plants are perennial and can survive for years under the proper conditions. Although potatoes are a cool weather crop, a hard frost or freeze can kill the plant’s growth above ground. Do potatoes die off in a single season?
Should you replant potatoes every year?
Plan on planting them as an annual crop and digging all tubers after the plant tops die back, no matter what climate you are growing in. Replant seed potatoes every year to continue to enjoy these versatile vegetables. Thinking of growing potatoes in your garden this season, but want to know if they will return each season?
What happens if a potato plant dies back?
If, however, your plant died back normally, which means the potatoes are ready to harvest, you may have potatoes left in the ground from last year – like Easter eggs hidden in the yard, found months later. Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) thrive in USDA hardiness zones 2 to 11, reports Missouri Botanical Garden.