Succession Planting Potatoes, Bush Beans and Turnips

Around the middle of March and after I have worked in several inches of compost, I plant a couple rows of Yukon Gold seed potatoes in bed C of my postage stamp garden. I have sprouted these seed potatoes by exposing them to warmth and light for a couple weeks in the house. When the sprouts are half an inch long, the seed potatoes are ready to be planted. Sprouting seed potatoes will mean a couple weeks earlier harvest maturity.  I plant the seed potatoes about 6” deep. If a frost threatens after the potato shoots have broken ground, I hill over them with some soil to protect them. In the past I have used egg sized seed potatoes because I thought that not cutting the potato would reduce the chance of the potatoes rotting in cold soil. Lately I have read that small seed potatoes may carry the genetics for small potatoes and large potatoes cut into pieces may carry the genetics for larger potatoes. This year I am going to plant a row of small and a row of large cut seed potatoes to see if there is a difference in yield. I plant the seed potatoes one foot apart and hill them twice. Yukon Gold potatoes taste great, store well if kept covered with a large towel in a laundry basket and they also produce early. Planted mid March, I expect to harvest them in early June. Remember that you can only do such early plantings if you have well drained sandy soil. If you do not have sandy soil then raised beds may help some to warm and dry your soil.

After I harvest the Yukon Gold early potatoes, I plant fast growing bush beans which can be harvested by the beginning of September. I plant three rows of bush beans in rows about one foot apart so that I can easily drag a sharp hoe from either side of the garden and shave out weeds when they first emerge. Get them small is the secret to weed control. If it doesn’t rain, I water the beans to get them up quickly. When the bean plants are about 10” tall I hill them to bury and kill any in-row weeds. After they are hilled, I can either straw mulch between the rows or plant more beans down the middle of the foot wide gap between the rows to provide living mulch to shade out weeds and increase the bean harvest.

When the bush beans have been pulled up and harvested in early September, I add some organic fertilizer then plant some fast growing turnips to be harvested before the first hard frost in November. These turnips along with carrots or winter radishes can be stored in containers of damp sand in the garage. At some point in winter, the stored Yukon Gold potatoes will be used up and then the turnips and sweet potatoes can be used as substitutes. Sweet potatoes will store until after the next crop of new potatoes come in and they make excellent French fries and hash browns; turnips can replace white potatoes in stews. Cooked turnip greens with onions can be eaten in the fall, allowing green beans frozen in the freezer to stretch through the winter. The seed catalogs claim that some Japanese turnip varieties such as Tokyo Cross are especially quick to mature and milder tasting than the traditional purple top turnips.  Three succession plantings take a lot of nutrients and require amending the soil and weeding between each planting.