Why Grow Your Own Potatoes?
- Chris Musser
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Buried treasure, better flavor, and varieties you can't buy anywhere.
There's a moment in late summer when you push a garden fork into the soil next to a dying potato vine, lift, and a cluster of tubers comes tumbling out of the ground. It never gets old. Potatoes are one of the few vegetables where the harvest is genuinely a surprise; you planted something small and unremarkable, and now you're pulling up a pile of gold, or purple, or rose-red, depending on what you grew. It's buried treasure, and it works on adults just as reliably as it works on kids. That alone is a reason to grow them. But there are two more.
The first is flavor. The Russet Burbank sitting in a mesh bag at the grocery store was likely harvested months ago, held in cold storage, and bred for uniformity and shelf stability rather than taste. Commercial potato production optimizes for size, skin toughness, and supply chain durability. Flavor is further down the list. Homegrown potatoes — freshly dug, cured briefly, cooked within weeks of harvest — are a genuinely different food. If you've only ever eaten supermarket potatoes, a freshly harvested Yukon Gold will surprise you.
The second reason is variety. Most of what you can find at retail is Russet Burbank and Yukon Gold, and maybe an occasional handful of fingerlings. The range of what potatoes can actually be — in flavor, texture, color, and culinary use — is almost entirely invisible in stores. The varieties I'm carrying this season exist specifically to fix that. Some of them you simply cannot buy anywhere.
The Varieties
Eight varieties this season, picked for flavor, performance in our maritime climate, and availability — most of these you will not find at a garden center in April.
Cheshire is an early red with deep yellow flesh and a waxy-starchy texture that makes it excellent roasted or baked. It comes in fast, with high yields and a vivid golden interior that looks as good as it tastes. Eat it first; it doesn't store long.
Yukon Gold needs no introduction, but it deserves one anyway. Round, smooth, thin-skinned, drought-tolerant, and excellent boiled, roasted, or in salads. What you may not know is how different a freshly dug Yukon Gold tastes from the ones that spent October through March in a warehouse. Grow it once and you'll understand.
German Butterball is mid-season, golden-skinned, with butter-yellow flesh and a creamy, firm texture that holds up to just about anything — baking, mashing, roasting, steaming, hash browns. It stores well and has outstanding flavor. This is the variety that serious home cooks tend to reach for.
Huckleberry Gold is one of the more interesting potatoes in this lineup. Purple skin, yellow flesh, and — unusually for a starchy food — a low glycemic index, documented by MSU researchers. It doesn't cause the rapid blood sugar spike that most potatoes do. It's resistant to common scab and verticillium wilt, produces medium-sized round to oval tubers, and is excellent baked, mashed, or roasted. You will not find this at Fred Meyer.
Magic Molly is a late-season Alaskan-bred fingerling with dark purple skin and flesh that holds its color even when boiled. The flavor is earthy and rich, and it's particularly good barbecued: the wood smoke complements the natural earthiness of the purple flesh in a way that's hard to describe. A good long-storing variety that will keep well into spring.
Russet Burbank is the potato that made Idaho famous. It is the classic baking potato with russet skin, shallow eyes, and brilliantly white, fluffy flesh. This is the one you want for a proper loaded baked potato, for fries with real substance, or for mashing when you want the potato to disappear into something creamy and rich. It stores exceptionally well (six months or more) and is scab-resistant. Luther Burbank bred it in the 1870s, and it remains the most widely grown potato in the United States for good reason.
Rose Finn Apple is my personal favorite. Rosy-buff skin, deep yellow flesh blushed with red, and a flavor that tastes like buttered potatoes. The texture is waxy and dry, which makes it exceptional for potato salad, where you want the potato to hold its shape and actually taste like something, rather than becoming a bland vehicle for dressing. It's also excellent roasted over coals. Vigorous vines, good yields, and long-keeping tubers. Don't overcrowd it.
Purple Peruvian is a late-season fingerling with striking purple skin and deep purple flesh, waxy and firm. Like Magic Molly, the color holds through cooking. Rich, slightly nutty flavor, and visually dramatic on any plate.
A Note on Timing
Seed potatoes will be ready for pick up on Saturday, March 14, and should be planted after they have been chitted (pre-sprouted by setting them in a cool, bright location for a week or two before planting). Portland's maritime climate is well-suited to potatoes — cool springs, relatively dry summers — though our heavy clay soils in East Portland benefit from amendment before planting. For detailed planting guidance specific to our region, OSU Extension and Washington State University Extension both have good resources on timing, spacing, and soil preparation, and I've included links in the next section to specific planting methods.
How to Grow Them
Potatoes are more flexible than most people realize. You don't need much space or perfect soil. Here are the three main methods.
In-ground is the traditional approach and produces the largest harvests. In East Portland, our clay-heavy soils benefit from amendment before planting. Work compost into the soil to loosen the structure and improve drainage. Potatoes want loose, well-aerated soil to form tubers; compacted clay works against you. Hilling — mounding soil up around the stems as the plant grows — increases yield and keeps developing tubers from greening in sunlight. How to Grow Potatoes in the Ground
Grow bags are a genuine solution for gardeners with compacted lots, paved surfaces, or limited ground space, and they make harvest almost effortless, just tip the bag over onto a tarp or into a wheelbarrow. I've grown potatoes in bags and found the process easier than in-ground, though my harvests were smaller. The likely culprit: bag size. For most potato varieties, 15 gallons is the minimum worth using; larger and later varieties benefit from 20 gallons or more. Undersized bags restrict root development and limit how many tubers the plant can set. Get the big bags. How to Grow Potatoes in Bags and How to Grow Potatoes in Pots
Wire cages or potato towers work on a similar principle to grow bags. Fill a cylindrical wire cage with soil or a soil-compost mix, plant inside, and add more material as the plant grows. At harvest, you simply unfasten the cage and the contents spill out, tubers and all. It's a tidy, low-effort method that works particularly well in small spaces and avoids the digging entirely. Growing potatoes in potato towers.
Pests to Know About
Potatoes have two enemies worth knowing before you plant.
Late blight (Phytophthora infestans) is the organism responsible for the Irish Potato Famine. It is present in the Pacific Northwest and can move fast in cool, wet conditions. It appears as dark, water-soaked lesions on leaves and stems, often with a white mold on the underside of leaves. The best controls are preventive: plant certified disease-free seed potatoes (which is what I carry), choose resistant varieties, space plants for good air circulation, and avoid overhead watering. If you see blight, remove affected foliage immediately and do not compost it.
Colorado potato beetles are the striped, round beetles and their reddish larvae that defoliate potato plants. Hand-picking works well at a small scale — go out in the morning when they're sluggish and drop them into soapy water. Consistent monitoring is more effective than reactive treatment. Parasitic wasps and ground beetles are natural predators; planting small-flowered nectar plants nearby (dill, yarrow, sweet alyssum) encourages them.
Why Seed Potatoes and Not Grocery Store Potatoes?
Seed potatoes are not seeds. They are small certified tubers, grown and inspected specifically for disease-free planting stock. Grocery store potatoes are treated to suppress sprouting and may carry disease. Using certified seed potatoes is the single most reliable way to start a clean crop, and it's why the varieties available through the club will outperform anything you could improvise from the produce aisle.
Order Now
Seed potatoes are available to purchase here. They will be ready for pickup on Saturday, March 14, from 11 am to 3 pm, or by appointment after the 14th. Order soon to guarantee your varieties.
East Portland Plant Club carries native plants selected for the Pacific Northwest. Our monthly pickups and seasonal sales are listed on the website and Facebook group.
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