Plant · P-215

Potato

Solanum tuberosum

Potato is a cool-season crop, not the heat-tolerant garden staple many gardeners expect: tubers stop bulking once summer soil gets hot, so it grows in a spring window for a May-June harvest and a second fall planting for a November-December one. It wants loose, acidic ground - alkaline clay both stunts it and causes scab, a skin disease - so growers hill it into raised beds built up with sand, compost and acidifying organic matter rather than planting straight into heavy clay. Culled and undersized tubers make a genuine winter livestock feed once cooked, but the green sprouts, light-exposed peel, and the haulms themselves are poisonous and must never go to stock.