📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Early Potatoes & Flopping Vines
- 🥔 The Harvest Formula: To harvest tender, thin-skinned “new” potatoes, wait exactly 2 weeks after the plants begin mass flowering.
- 🤫 “Bandicooting” (Robbing): You don’t have to kill the whole plant to get early potatoes. You can gently dig into the side of the hill with your fingers and steal a few large tubers 1 week after flowering, letting the rest continue to grow.
- 📉 Do NOT Tie Up Vines: When potato vines get tall and flop over onto the dirt, leave them alone! Tying them up wastes your time. In fact, intentionally rolling or flattening potato vines is an old-school hack to force the plant to stop growing leaves and push all its energy into sizing up the tubers.
- 🐛 The Early Bed Danger: If you start potatoes early in warm, heavily composted beds, be warned: soil pests (like Mole Crickets or grubs) will flock to the warmth and can devour the roots.
🌍 You’re reading a translated thread from our Russian-language forum. These growers garden in climates very similar to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, and Ontario (short summers, late frosts, and cold soil).
Have a different potato harvesting hack in your region? Drop a comment below! We’d love to compare notes.
My potato vines are falling over—should I tie them up?
Aleksan9ra (Ludmila) wrote:
Between the dampness and the heat, I just feel sorry for myself out in the garden.
Oh, that perfectly describes my mood this year regarding the entire garden! 😂
Luda, tell me, when do we actually start digging up early potatoes that were started indoors as transplants? I planted 6 bushes from transplants as an experiment for the first time. They are blooming right now, but the vines are getting so tall that they are flopping over and laying on the ground. Should I be tying them up to stakes?
Here are photos showing the difference between my early transplants and the regular directly-sown potatoes… it’s like night and day! 🥔🌿
Russi (Anna) wrote:
…the vines are flopping over… Should I be tying them up?
Anya, absolutely do not tie them up! In fact, the opposite is true: to make the potato plant yield larger tubers, many growers intentionally roll or flatten the vines down to the ground.
Both of your beds look absolutely gorgeous! You’ve inspired me; I need to go dig around in the remnants of my own early potatoes today and see if there is anything left down there. 🥔
Speaking of early potatoes, Anya, I will likely end up with zero early potatoes this year.
I grew three times as many indoor potato transplants this spring. I prepared three whole beds instead of just one. The seedlings were tall, so I planted them deeply in trenches, they took root perfectly, and took off growing. I fed them, watered them, and hilled them up nicely once.
And what do you think happened? Mole Crickets (Gryllotalpidae) found those three beautiful, warm, loose beds and absolutely decimated them. There is practically not a single untouched bush left. I gave up on them and just planted new seed potatoes nearby. 🐛😭
The most interesting/frustrating part is that the three adjacent beds where I planted regular seed potatoes later in the season are totally fine. The mole crickets only went for the early, warm transplant beds!
Russi (Anna) wrote:
…when do we actually start digging up early potatoes?
There is a very simple formula for determining exactly when to dig early “new” potatoes: 2 weeks from the beginning of mass flowering.
If you are really craving fresh young potatoes earlier than that, you can start “robbing” the plants (carefully digging into the hill with your hands and extracting individual large tubers without pulling up the whole bush) starting 1 week after flowering. 🌸🥔
Most gardeners in North America plant “seed potatoes” (cut-up pieces of actual potatoes) directly into the cold spring ground. However, in regions with extremely short summers growers often start their potatoes indoors in pots a month early, treating them like tomato seedlings. By transplanting a fully leafy potato plant into the garden after the last frost, they can shave 3-4 weeks off the growing season and harvest “new potatoes” incredibly early in the summer. Just watch out for soil pests, who love the heavily composted, pre-warmed beds!
