Growing Yukon Gold Potatoes

About Yukon Gold

Yukon Gold was bred at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, by potato breeder Gary Johnston, and released in 1980. It has smooth, thin, light yellow skin with shallow eyes, often tinged pink, and yellow flesh. In the kitchen it's an all-purpose potato: moist enough to boil and roast whole, and good for mashing too. It helped make yellow-fleshed potatoes popular in North American stores, and it's still one of the most familiar names on seed potato lists.

Why it suits a Kratky container

• Season: early to mid-season, so it finishes before a long summer heat and before one container of solution is stretched too far.
• Plant size: fairly compact, so a 5-gallon bucket or a deep tote can hold it.
• Availability: one of the most widely sold seed potatoes, so it's easy to find certified seed.
• Use: good as new potatoes and as a stored crop, so a small harvest goes a long way.

Yukon Gold through the season

• Chitting: a few weeks in a bright, cool place before planting, until the seed potatoes have short, sturdy shoots. Yukon Gold seed is often small enough to plant whole.
• Planting: set the seed potato in the basket with the shoots up, the base of the basket just touching fresh nutrient solution.
• Leaves and roots: the first weeks build the plant. Roots grow down into the solution and the level begins to fall.
• Flowering: tubers usually start around now. Switch your top-ups to a lower-nitrogen mix, and keep adding medium around the stems.
• Filling out: the tubers swell and the plant drinks the most. Check the level and the root-zone temperature more often.
• Die-back: the foliage yellows and dies. Wait a week or two for the skins to set, then lift the basket.

What to watch for

Large Yukon Gold tubers are slightly prone to hollow heart, a hollow in the center of the potato that forms during fast growth. It's harmless to eat, so just cut it out. Steady moisture and a cool root zone help tubers grow evenly. Like any thin-skinned potato, Yukon Gold also greens quickly in light, so keep the basket topped up with medium and the container dark.

Yukon Gold and other early potatoes

• Red Norland is an early red-skinned potato with white flesh. It often matures a little sooner and is waxier, which makes it a good new potato.
• Yukon Gold sits between waxy and floury, so it works for more dishes, and it stores well once cured.
• Russets are later, larger plants with floury flesh, and a harder crop in a container. See russet potatoes.

Yukon Gold in the kitchen

Yukon Gold's thin skin doesn't need peeling once it's scrubbed. The yellow flesh is creamy and holds together when boiled, which makes it good in potato salad and for roasting whole, and it also mashes smoothly without turning gluey. Home-grown new potatoes are especially good simply boiled.

Harvest and storage

For new potatoes, feel gently through the medium a few weeks after flowering. For the main crop, wait for the foliage to die back and the skins to set, then cure the tubers in the dark before storing them. See when to harvest hydroponic potatoes for the details.

Where to get Yukon Gold seed

Garden centers, farm stores and seed catalogs carry certified Yukon Gold seed potatoes in season, from late winter into spring. See where to buy seed potatoes, and potato varieties for Kratky growing for other varieties to try once Yukon Gold has worked for you.

Sources

• PotatoPro, "Yukon Gold" variety profile