Time to get those potatoes off the couch and into the garden!

Now is a great time to plant potatoes in the garden. They are easy to grow and the tubers you'll harvest are delicious!

The first thing to do is to get certified seed potatoes from a nursery. Store-bought potatoes have been treated with a growth retardant to keep them from sprouting, so they are not usually good candidates for the garden. Examine your seed potatoes for "eyes" and then cut into generous 1 to 2-inch pieces. Try to have more than one eye on a piece.

What you see here are Yukon Gold and Red Potatoes. Once they are all cut up they need to be air dried for a few days to heal up the cuts.

The next step is to plant them in a garden. I use a mulching technique that has worked well for me over the years, and I think will be especially important here in the alkaline and heavy clay Central Texas soils. I laid my potato pieces cut side down on the ground and then covered them with some of the leaves I have snagged from the neighbors.

As the potato plant grows, I will mound the leaves around it. This encourages the plant to form tubers that will just lay on top of the ground. All I will have to do this fall is pull away the leaves and harvest the bounty. The added benefit of using leaf mulch is that the decomposing leaves contribute organic matter at a lower pH than the soil beneath it. This makes for a healthier, more vigorous plant that will produce more potatoes. Another good thing about this method is that it doesn't require a lot of soil preparation. This means you can plant even when things are still a little too wet to work your ground. Plant your potato pieces about two feet apart so they have plenty of room to produce tubers.

So go ahead! Get out there and make this your year of the potato!