I think the temperature patern is a factor in potato maturity. That means, if in one place days highs are 75F and nights lows 50F and in another location they are 85F and 60F, then potato plants will mature in shorter time in the latter. But generally, potato plant will mature in 100 to 120 days; That is from sprouting out of ground till harvest. In zone 7/8 (GA) I planted in early March.But we have had a lot of cooler days/nights. So I expect to harvest early in July. I can (hopefully) reach in and get young potatoes from early June on. The flowering and stem texture can tell that too. As the plant gets near harvest time, its stems become woody and turn light brown or pale green. But the best indication will be on the potatoes that you dig out. The skin should be harder and will look like store bought ones. But as long as there is no danger of frost, and plants top have some life, I would leave them in the ground longer.

I'm not a red oak fan. I don't like its smell, its stringiness and its lousy burn. I much prefer white oak or choke cherry. I had a fire going in the Defiant, cherry from a blow down in the front yard last winter. I could smell it whilst car crawling. Smells like a maraschino cherry . I replaced the broken latch on the Defiant's side door with a bolt and washers. I caulked the door edges with gasket material and pushed it in as I tightened the bolt. This has restored a great amount of the stove's "airtightness" . I have more repairs to go, but that was the most bang for least effort. The stove was rated at 40,000 BTU and heated a 1200 sqare foot house. That was 40 yrs ago . Most of the plates are cracked. The inner baffle burnt out years ago I snapped off the worst of the warped piece, I intend to strap it roughly back into place with lots of slack built in to accomodate expansion. Heating oil is about 3.40 a gallon. I have a hot air system . Firewood is 275 $ a cord. Most of the house also has 220 Volt electric baseboard. The chimney was put in an enclosed porch. Then a few yrs later, I rolled the porch away, and put in a 28 x 28 , 2 story addition on a 20 X 28 with a 12x12 ell. Story and a half New England farmhouse built about 1870 from local pine. So the chimney is in a center of the house now. Thanksgiving of '85 I tended a mason who corbled the last 5 feet over 4 inches to clear the ridge pole Instead of splitting the ridge each course of brick was hung out about 3/8 of an inch.to the north. The masonry is great. It retains heat and heats the sheetrock plaster in the stairwell.

They're different from Irish potatoes in that Irish potatoes grow up, so you plant them deep and keep covering them. Sweets grow down, so you plant them high and let them go. That's why I make a hill that's about knee high before I start. Watering has been a progression from 5 gallon buckets before I lived there hauled in from somewhere else through using larger sturdy Rubbermaid type containers with watering cans to what I have today. I now have a used 500 gallon poly tank (thanks craig's list) on an old military wagon (thanks craig's list) that I haul behind the tractor (thanks craig's list) and walk the rows with a hose. It's on a slight incline, so I get really good pressure for this. I make a cocktail I've mentioned a time or two with fish emulsion, chelated iron, NOG, and a handful of 20 Mule Team Borax. I had a soil test a couple years ago and the micronutrients were lacking. I forgot whether it was manganese or magnesium now. But the chelated iron covers that. If I have to water more than a couple times, the clay crusts over and then I've found that I can jam a piece of rebar into the hill next to the slips and water inside the hill instead of on top and have it run off. yes, I do that for every slip. It really doesn't take as long as it might sound. And it's low impact exercise. Sometimes I'll just jam the end of the hose in the hill and let it set a few seconds on each. This season I made an extension from CPVC so it's sturdy enough to do that and small enough to fill juice bottles for another idea I had. But alas, it has been a wet summer and I haven't tried that yet. I had a water wand attached last year and it froze and snapped last winter. CPVC is cheaper and longer, so less bending. :-) I've thought about running drip irrigation down the rows and just let it run a few hours every evening after I get them planted, but I haven't done that and it makes it difficult to get the tractor in to cultivate. Sweets are pretty durable and have a strong will to live, so I may never do the drip line. Save that for my tomatoes. :-) I should have added that I only water to get them going until I start seeing new growth. Then rain keeps them watered. If it doesn't rain in a couple weeks during their first month, they could probably use a drink. But I think I water usually about 4 times and quit. First day, third day, 6th or 7th day then when I see the ground is dry, 10th or 12th day. Then just watch and hope it rains. This post was edited by chrisb_sc_z7 on Fri, Sep 6, 13 at 14:18

Borderokie, I answered the potato-preserving question on your thread about preserving potatoes. I freeze quite a lot from the garden and usually fill up three freezers in a good year. I can a lot, but don't particularly care for canned potatoes, and I dehydrate a lot because my convection oven has a built-in food dehydration mode. Scott, I found a few rotten ones yesterday and today, and that almost never happens. Like you observed, they were under plants that still had plenty of green and which I met have left in the ground a bit longer, but the heat is making me paranoid. I've been digging as fast as I can by hand, and only have one raised bed of potatoes left to go. I'm 90% done so I am feeling like the finish line is in sight. After carefully hand-digging each bed, I still felt like I was missing some taters, so took my little Mantis cultivator and ran it down the rows and it unearthed quite a few potatoes I had missed, and it didn't cut up many of them either. That's the first time I've used the Mantis that way....to sort of glean my own rows after I thought I was already done. I have been harvesting Candy and Superstar this week too, and took out the last few today. Their necks were soft but they hadn't fallen over yet. However, with all the others harvested, I was worried these last 8 or 10 onions would sunburn so I went ahead and yanked them out. They did really well this year and gave me the biggest onions of the year. We had quite a few that were softball sized. All the other onions had a wide variety of sizes, but the Candy and Superstar were more consistently big. I had volunteer Laura Bush petunias pop up in the onion rows where Candy and Superstar were growing and let them stay there, and those were the biggest onions, so maybe next year, I'll let more volunteer petunias stay in the onion rows. While it is true that the onion and potato harvest are really good, I still haven't forgotten all the trouble involved in dealing with those late frosts, but I'm trying to forget them. We have had to work hard for the good harvest, but at least the hard work paid off.So far, knock on wood, the squash, sweet corn and cucumbers are looking really good too, as are the tomatoes and peppers. I think at the rate we're going, it is going to be an exhausting summer, but in a good way. Now, I'm racing like crazy to get all the corn harvested. I have 5 varieties and I staggered the planting dates as well as I could (and some varieties are separated from others by either distance or barrier plantings or both), but in that way that nature has of ignoring the best-laid plants, all the later plantings have just about caught up with the earlier ones, so as soon as I finish harvesting one variety, it is time to move on to the next. For a long time, you could look at the size of each planting and know which one was planted first, second, third, etc. and then they all shot up overnight and started tasseling and silking and I've never seen corn grow so fast before. Not sure if it is all the rain since May or all the heat, but it is as if the 5 varieties are racing one another to the finish line. I just hope some rain falls occasionally. One thing I haven't missed at all is all the irrigation. I've hardly had to water at all since mid-May, and then only to get seeds to sprout or to water in new transplants. Our last water bill was "normal", which was nice after the way they had skyrocketed the last two summers. :Larry, The way I found the first icky rotten potato was I picked it up to brush the dirt off of it and it pretty much collapsed into a gooey mess in my hand. It was just gross. After that, I watched the sticky soil on potatoes more carefully. Dawn