How to Save Your Own Seed Potatoes for Next Year

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Potatoes are a really fun vegetable to add to a backyard garden because it feels a bit like a treasure hunt digging them up, and homegrown potatoes taste absolutely amazing, too! And just like with seeds that you can save from vegetables in your garden, you can save back some of your potato harvest for planting again the next season, too. The only difference is that instead of saving the seeds from the potato plants you would be saving the actual potato and then planting that in the ground next year. (Saving seeds from potato plants would be a whole other topic, and it’s something I’ve never tried before in my garden either. Maybe someday!)

I’ve been saving seed potatoes from my garden for several years now, and so far it’s worked well for me, and it’s been nice to be able to plant potatoes without having to buy new seed potatoes each year. Once you learn the basics about how to save your own seed potatoes it’s really pretty simple, and it’s a great way to save some money on your garden, too.

Why Save Your Own Seed Potatoes?

One of the biggest reasons why you might want to try saving your own seed potatoes to plant the following year is because you can save money by doing so. If you save some of the potatoes that you already grew in your garden then you don’t have to spend money on new seed potatoes for the next season. Ideally, if all went well and you were able to have a successful harvest of potatoes each year with no issues, then you could buy seed potatoes just one time and keep growing them year after year and not have to buy seed potatoes again after that initial time. (This doesn’t always work, though, as I’ll mention further below. But by saving your own you can at least reduce the frequency of having to buy new seed potatoes so that you don’t have to do it every single year.)

Another reason why it might be good to save back some of the potatoes from your own garden for next year is because those potatoes would have been grown in your yard with your climate and soil and growing conditions, etc. So it’s possible that the potatoes you grew yourself and saved for seed would be better adapted to your individual garden than seed potatoes that you purchase that were grown in a different location.

And another reason why you might want to save your own potatoes from your garden is if you are growing more rare, hard-to-find varieties. I’m growing some old 18th and 19th century varieties that aren’t available in standard seed catalogs. I found most of the initial seed potatoes on Seed Saver’s Exchange, but since I received just a few small seed potatoes for each variety, it wouldn’t make sense for me to keep buying those year after year. The idea of having them available on Seed Savers Exchange is to have enough to grow some so that you can then save seed for future years. So, if you are looking for really unique and rare varieties then you will probably need to save your own seed potatoes rather than buying new seed potatoes each year.

I have five different old potato varieties that I’ve been growing in my garden: Burbank, Cups, Irish Cobbler, Garnet Chile, and Thorburn’s White Peach Blow. All of them are from the 1870s and earlier. And the Cups variety is really unique because it is the oldest variety I am growing (and the oldest variety I’ve been able to find anywhere so far), and it is even more rare because it survived the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. Like I mentioned above, all of them were ones that I bought from Seed Savers Exchange, except for the Irish Cobbler potatoes which I bought from Organic Heirloom Gardens. So, if you’re interested in old heirloom potato varieties those are a couple of places where I was able to find mine. (Seed Savers Exchange may not always have the same varieties available each year, though, so just be aware of that. When I checked their site, as of the time I am writing this, I saw all five of these varieties listed, but that may change in the future.)

Why You Might Not Want To Save Your Own Seed Potatoes

There are a couple of reasons why people say that it might not always be best to save potatoes that you grew in your own garden for seed. One reason is because potatoes can have problems with diseases, and one way to avoid that issue would be to buy new certified seed potatoes each year from a reputable source. Another reason is that over time the size of the potatoes can get smaller if you save them year after year like this potato growing guide from Seed Savers Exchange mentions.

If you experience either of those things happening with your potatoes then it might be a good idea to get some fresh seed potatoes. What I’ve decided to do for my garden is to keep saving my own seed potatoes for as long as I don’t see signs of disease and as long as the size of the potatoes doesn’t decrease too much. If I notice either of those things then I would probably get new seed potatoes, but otherwise I will keep saving my own potatoes for as long as I can.

What Kind of Potatoes Should You Save?

When you’re saving potatoes to use as seed for the following year, you want to make sure that you are saving the best quality possible. You want potatoes that will store through the winter until the following spring without going bad. You don’t need to save the largest potatoes that you have, but you want to save some decent-sized ones that will have several eyes on them. And, as hard as it it is to save them aside rather than eating them, it’s a good idea to save some of your best-looking potatoes for seed for the next year. The main three qualities that you want are potatoes that are:

• Healthy and free from disease
• Free from any major insect issues
• Firm with the skin intact

If you have any potatoes that were sliced by a shovel or other garden tool while you were harvesting then those are best to use for eating rather than saving them as seed potatoes. (And those ones probably won’t keep as long in storage either, so you’ll want to use them up fairly quickly, too.)

How Many Potatoes Should You Save?

The amount of potatoes that you save aside will depend on how many potato plants you want to grow in your garden the next year, of course, but I like to take that number and then save a little bit extra just in case. So if, for example, you planted 5 pounds worth of seed potatoes this past year, you might want to save an extra quarter of a pound or so just in case you lose some of your seed potatoes in storage over the winter.

Another thing that can be helpful is to grow more than one variety of potato because if one variety is more susceptible to disease or if one variety is more effected by the weather in a particular growing season then you aren’t putting all of your eggs into one basket. If one of your potato varieties ends up not doing as well then the other varieties that you grew might do better.

How to Save Your Potatoes for Seed

Harvest Them Carefully

When you’re harvesting your potatoes you want to be as careful as possible so that you don’t accidentally puncture them with a shovel or other gardening tool. Digging them up by hand is the best way to be extra careful with them, but it’s also a lot of work and makes your hands a total mess (ask me how I know…) If you have a small amount of potato plants than harvesting by hand might be doable. But if you have a large amount of potato plants then you might need to use a shovel or something to help to dig them up. The goal is just to be as gentle as possible so that you can keep the skins intact.

Don’t Wash Your Potatoes

You don’t want to get your potatoes wet after you harvest them if at all possible, so you don’t want to wash the potatoes that you are going to be saving for seed. It’s also best to harvest your potatoes on a dry day when the ground is fairly dry, too. This will make it easy to brush the majority of the dirt off of the potatoes without washing them. You can gently brush off any dirt that will come off of the potatoes easily, but you don’t want to rub them too hard until the skin has had a chance to cure and harden up. You can always brush off more dirt later on once the potatoes have cured. (Once the potatoes are fully cured the dirt brushes off very easily.)

Cure Your Potatoes

Curing your potatoes after harvesting them is a very important step because you want to let the skins of the potatoes dry out and harden up before you store them. When the potatoes are freshly harvested the skins are softer and more delicate, and so you want to let them dry out and cure for a bit. To do this, you can lay your potatoes out somewhere to cure where they will be out of the sun and also in a place with some airflow. It’s also a good idea to put them in a single layer rather than piling a bunch on top of each other.

I usually lay mine out underneath a settee in the living room because they are out of the way in a fairly dark place there and there is pretty decent airflow in that room, too, with fans and the air conditioner running (since I’m usually harvesting my potatoes in the late summer.) You could also lay them out on a table in a room that stays pretty dark, or I’ve also seen people put them on shelves or racks to cure them.

Store Your Potatoes

Once you’re potatoes are fully cured, you’ll want to store them in a cool, dry, and dark place. You don’t want them to be exposed to light, especially to sunlight, and you don’t want them in a place where they will be too warm or damp either. I usually store mine in the refrigerator, and I’ve found that that has worked well for me the past several years. I store mine in paper bags in the fridge, and I also make sure not to store them near any apples in the fridge because being close to apples could cause the potatoes to start ripening faster.

If you want to be able to store apples for a long time throughout the winter months and you want to use a refrigerator to do that, it will be more challenging to store seed potatoes if you have only one refrigerator. If you have a second fridge or a mini fridge then it would be best to separate the seed potatoes and the apples into different fridges. But if you have only one fridge and you are storing apples in it then it might be better to find another place to store the seed potatoes that will stay cool and dark. You might be able to store them in a cellar or in a room in your house that doesn’t get much heat during the winter time. You just want to make sure that wherever you store them won’t get so cold that the potatoes will actually freeze.

Inspect Your Potatoes Occasionally

I don’t always remember to do this step like I should, but it’s a good idea to take a look at your seed potatoes once in a while just to make sure that there aren’t any of them that have gone bad. If you have one rotten potato in the bag then the rest of them could eventually be effected, too, and you could even end up losing all of them. Ideally it would be good to inspect them every few weeks so that you can remove any potatoes that are starting to go bad quickly before they get any worse.

Prepare Your Potatoes for Planting

The final step in saving your own seed potatoes is to check on them a few weeks before you plan to start putting your potatoes in the ground to see if there are any sprouts forming on your potatoes. Depending on the potato variety you have, your storage conditions, and how long you’ve had them in storage you might see lots of long sprouts on your potatoes or you might see hardly anything and the potatoes might not look much different from how they looked when you harvested.

By the time spring comes around my seed potatoes usually have plenty of sprouts and are ready for planting, but sometimes I will have some that don’t have any sprouts starting yet. That’s why I like to check them a few weeks before I’m going to be ready to plant so that I can take them out of the fridge and give them a chance to start forming some sprouts so that they will be ready for me to plant outside when the time comes. I’ve found that taking the potatoes out of the fridge and putting them in a place where it is warm and bright for a few weeks is usually enough for little sprouts to start growing on them.

And, thankfully this hasn’t happened to me yet, but checking the potatoes a few weeks before planting also gives you enough time to order some backup seed potatoes if needed if you forgot about checking them over periodically like in the previous step and you find that you’ve lost some of them in storage over the winter.

And once your potatoes have sprouted, you can simply plant your homegrown seed potatoes like you usually would and then, if all goes well, you can save some again at the end of the season for the next year!

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The information in this post is not to be taken as medical advice and is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease.