Get some seed potatoes, which can be purchased in garden stores, lumber yards and grocery stores in early spring. Don't plant potatoes that you bought for eating but never got to. Seed potatoes are worth the extra cost. They are disease free and suitable for gardening in your area. Each seed potato will have many small sprouts called eyes. Cut them up so that each one is the size of a chicken egg and contains one or more of these eyes. Let them sit for one day to let the cut heal and dry over.
There are many methods of growing potatoes. I grow mine by digging a 5 inch deep trench, and placing the potato peices along it 1 foot (30 cm) apart. Then I rake the soil level over them. As the plant grows up, I hill up soil around it. The best potatoes grow above the original potato, from sprouts grown along the buried stem.
Another method is to plant the potatoes in the same type of trench, and hill up with straw or leaves. In fact, you can grow potatoes in virtually no soil at all. One method involves planting potatoes in a bed of straw at the bottom of a barrel. As the potato grows up, more straw is placed in the barrel, so that the plant is in effect being hilled up. I have also seen cardboard potato barrels for sale for patio gardeners. A drawback with the soilless method is that the only way to fertilize the plants is with soluble fertilizers, often chemical.
There is not much more to growing potatoes -- as mentioned earlier, they are dead easy.
Hill up your plants regularly. Don't cover the entire plant -- just 6 inches of soil at one time, around the base of the plant.
Water deeply, and not too often. I like to let the soil dry a bit between watering. For me this means I water about every 5 days if there is no rain. REMEMBER -- your potatoes can crack from swelling full of too much water, so sometimes less IS better.
Once your potato plants flower, you can harvest new, baby potatoes.
Once the potato plants start to die back, the potatoes will not increase much in size. I like to pull mine up at this point to avoid the fall rains in Vancouver, which can cause otherwise beautiful potatoes to swell and crack. If you live in an area with dry autumn weather, you can leave them in for longer.
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