How to Grow Potatoes: Buried Treasure, Step by Step

GardenDraft Team · July 22, 2026 · 6 min read

Part of: Garden Planning Guides · How to Grow Vegetables — Crop Guides A–Z

Few crops feel as much like buried treasure as potatoes. You plant a chunk of potato, ignore it for three months, then dig and find a dozen more. They're genuinely easy: the handful of rules that matter are mostly about light, soil, and not planting them where their relatives just grew.

Start with seed potatoes, not the grocery store

Plant certified seed potatoes — small tubers grown specifically to be disease-free. Supermarket potatoes are often treated to suppress sprouting and can carry disease into your soil. Cut larger seed potatoes into chunks a couple of days before planting, each with one or two "eyes" (the little buds), and let the cut faces dry so they don't rot. Small seed potatoes go in whole.

Cool soil, full sun, loose ground

Potatoes are a cool-season crop. Plant a few weeks before your last frost date, once the soil is workable and around 45°F. The shoots can take a light frost, and you can mound soil over them if a hard freeze threatens. Set seed pieces about 4 inches deep and a foot apart in full sun, in loose soil worked with compost. Skip fresh manure and go easy on lime; potatoes prefer slightly acidic ground.

Hilling is the key move

This is the step that defines a potato crop. As the plants grow, mound soil (or straw) up around the stems, leaving just the top leaves exposed, and repeat every couple of weeks. Hilling does two jobs: it gives the plant more buried stem to set tubers along, increasing yield, and — critically — it keeps developing potatoes covered. Any tuber exposed to light turns green and produces solanine, which is mildly toxic. Green potatoes get cut away or composted, so keep them in the dark.

Watch for the usual nightshade trouble

Potatoes share pests and diseases with tomatoes and eggplant, which is exactly why you rotate them — never plant potatoes where any nightshade grew in the last few years (see crop rotation). Patrol for the Colorado potato beetle, whose larvae can strip a plant fast, and for the early and late blight that scorches the foliage.

Digging: new vs. storage

For tender new potatoes, dig gently a couple of weeks after the plants flower. For full-size storage potatoes, wait until the tops yellow and die back, then leave the tubers in the ground another two weeks to set their skins. Dig on a dry day, brush off the soil (don't wash), and cure them in the dark for a week or two before storing somewhere cool. Set your planting date with the planting calendar.