Vegetable Gardening (37 page)

‘Superior':
This early-season tuber has buff-colored skin and white flesh. It's scab disease-resistant, grows under a wide range of conditions, and stores for a long time. A keeper!

‘Viking Purple':
This midseason, purple-skinned, white-fleshed variety can endure dry weather and stores well. It tastes great boiled or mashed.

‘Yukon Gold':
This very early variety with yellow skin and flesh produces high yields and is drought tolerant. It's a great keeper; in fact, I've been known to still be eating this variety from storage 8 months after harvest. This moist-fleshed potato is best in salads or boiled. Plus it makes a great chip!

Even though most potatoes are grown from seed potatoes, you can grow potatoes from seeds just as you do with tomatoes and peppers. One hybrid, late-maturity, true-seed variety that's currently available is called ‘Catalina' (which is very similar to ‘Kennebec'). For best results, start seeds indoors a month before planting. You grow your crop the same way that you grow other potatoes. Growing potatoes from seeds is a bit trickier but less expensive than planting seed potatoes, and you reduce the chance of passing on any tuber-borne diseases to your new crop. (See the later section "Keeping Your Root Crops Healthy and Pest-Free" for more on potato diseases.)

Growing and Gathering Root Crops

Root crops are easy to grow if you have good soil, water, and proper spacing. The mystery of root crops is that you can't see the reward until you dig them up. But that's half the fun of growing them.

General guidelines for all your root crops

The keys to growing great root crops are preparing the soil bed well and giving the plants room to grow. You also need to keep the crops clear of weeds and make sure they have enough water. Here are further details on each of these important points:

All root crops like well-drained, loose, fertile soil.
And with the exception of potatoes, which grow best in hills (as you find out later in this chapter), root crops grow best in raised beds (see Chapter 3 for more on these special beds). They also can grow if you have a gardening spot that gets only 4 to 6 hours of direct sun a day. Try some carrots and onions in that patch.

To prepare the soil, add a 3- to 4-inch layer of compost or manure at least 2 to 3 months before you're ready to plant. If you wait until just before planting to add fresh compost or manure, you're likely to get poor growth. Why? Too much nitrogen fertilizer on carrots and potatoes in spring promotes foliage growth but not good tuber and root formation. Instead, root crops enjoy phosphorous, which promotes root growth, so perform a soil test (see Chapter 14), and based on the results, add bone meal or rock phosphate fertilizer before planting to keep your roots happy.

Onions in particular like lots of fertilizer, and they can stand some extra nitrogen, which promotes leaf growth. Add extra fertilizer when the transplants are 6 inches tall and the bulbs begin to swell. Then add a complete organic fertilizer, such as 5-5-5, at 1 pound per 10 feet. (See Chapter 15 for more on fertilizers.)

Root crops, especially carrots and onions, require proper spacing to grow at their best.
Thin out the young seedlings when they're 3 to 4 weeks old by pulling them out or snipping them until they're properly spaced (see Chapter 13 for details on thinning seedlings). Onions should be 4 inches apart, scallions 2 inches apart, and carrots 3 inches apart. Potatoes don't need thinning and should be planted 8 to 10 inches apart when planted.

I know that thinning your hearty crops sounds cruel, but if you don't do it, the roots won't have enough room to expand, causing you to get lots of plants but few roots — and fewer roots means fewer carrots and onions.

You'll be rewarded with lots of crisp roots in no time if you regularly weed your root crop patch.
After a good thinning, hand-weed beds of carrots and onions; potatoes can be weeded with a hoe. Mulch the bed with hay or straw. You don't have to mulch in between individual onion and carrot plants. Simply mulch around the beds, and keep them well watered.

Carrots, onions, and potatoes are root crops that like cool temperatures. They grow best and have the best flavor when temperatures stay below 80 degrees Fahrenheit.

Cultivating carrots

Carrot seeds are small and take up to 2 weeks to germinate, so you run a greater risk of poor germination with them than with other vegetables. To get your carrots off on the right foot, try these tips:

Prevent forked roots in carrots by making sure the soil is free of rocks, sticks, and hard pieces of soil.
If carrot roots come in contact with a hard object as they're growing, they fork, creating a multipronged carrot. Even though they're interesting to look at and a conversation piece at dinner, forked roots are harder to clean and yield fewer carrots. No soil can be completely free of rocks and sticks, but when building a raised bed try to remove as many as possible. And be sure to amend the soil with compost to make the soil looser so the roots stay straight. If your soil is heavy clay or a rock jungle, try growing round varieties such as ‘Thumbelina'.