How to Fertilize Potatoes

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Doug Smiddy with Smiddy's Gardening Services on behalf of expertvillage.com. Today we are going to talk about how to plant, grow and harvest potatoes. Fertilizing potatoes is important and you need to understand because it is a below ground crop, it is going to need a fertilizer that is lower in nitrogen. Nitrogen is what promotes leaves, top growth so if you have too much nitrogen in your fertilizer or in the soil, what is going to happen is you are going to have beautiful green lush looking tops and no potatoes. So what you want to use is a fertilizer that is going to be something like a 5/10/10 or 8/16/16. I also like to mix in a product called sulpomag which is sulphur , potassium and magnesium. You can find it at any garden center and what I do is mix about a 50/50 blend of my fertilizer and my sulpomag and shake it up in the bag really well and once my potatoes are in, I just take a couple of handfuls and do kind of a band dressing like right over the top like that and follow your directions on your bag. You do not want to over fertilize. It is better to under fertilize twice than to over fertilize once. You don't want to burn your roots. So that will give me a good general application. I take my hand held cultivator and lightly scratch it into the soil so when I water it, those particles break down and they become part of the soil and start feeding your potatoes and get the roots going and you watch them come up. About 4 weeks after that, you give them another dose of fertilizer and you just watch those things grow. You are going to be so happy. "