Last edited by shiny on 8 Nov 2026. View history

Home Guard Potato

No scientific name recorded

A variety of potato

How to sow home guard potato: Direct seed outdoors after last frost. Each piece must have one eye.

Sun requirement for home guard potato: Plant in Full Sun

Potatoes are starchy root vegetables in the Solanaceae, or Nightshade, family, which also includes tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers. They originated in South America, and spread to become a worldwide staple. The leaves and fruit are usually poisonous and the stem tuber is the only edible part once it is cooked. The potato can be cooked in many ways, brewed into alcohol, and also used as the basis for creating bioplastics. More growing information is available in individual species entries.

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0: harvests
0: seed packets

Growstuff is a free, community-run site for people who grow food. Keep track of what you plant and harvest, find seeds to swap, and see what is growing near you. Join to record your own home guard potatoes.

Home guard potato facts

Lifespan

Annual living and reproducing in a single year or less

What are growing degree days?

A plant grows with warmth, not with days. A growing degree day is one day's worth of useful warmth: how many degrees the day's average temperature is above the lowest temperature the crop grows at. Add them up from planting and you know how far along the crop is, whatever the calendar says.

Say that lowest temperature is 10°C. A day averaging 17°C gives 7 growing degree days. A day averaging 8°C gives none, as it is too cold for the crop to grow. That is why the same lettuce takes about 50 days in a summer and 90 in an autumn: it needs the same total warmth either way.

For home guard potato, the FAO EcoCrop database gives a lowest growing temperature of 7°C and a shortest growing cycle of 90 days at its best temperature, about 1170 growing degree days to a first harvest.

Where you've told us where your garden is, we use this and the weather there to predict when your home guard potato will be ready to harvest. We don't use it for how long a plant lives or when it finishes: we go by what members have logged for that.