🥔 Potato
Prefers cool weather; tubers swell fastest at 15–20°C soil temperature.
Potato at a glance
Is Potato frost tolerant?
Barely. A light frost is enough to damage it (0°C), and it is killed below -2°C. Treat it as frost-tender.
What temperature does Potato grow best in?
It grows best between 10 and 26°C. Below 7°C it stops growing altogether, and above 29°C it slows down.
How many days does Potato take to mature?
About 80–100 days. That is a typical figure: it needs roughly 900 °C·d of warmth above 7°C, so a warm season gets it there sooner and a cool one later. The city calendars below give the sow and harvest dates for each place.
Is Potato a cool-season or warm-season crop?
Somewhere in between: it cannot take frost, so plant it after your last frost, but it starts growing from about 7°C — earlier in spring than the true heat-lovers.
What the numbers mean
These are the actual parameters this game runs on. Growth is driven by growing degree days: each day contributes max(0, min(mean temp, 30) − 7), and Potato is ready when that total reaches 900. That is why the same seed takes a very different number of days in Dublin and in Guangzhou.
| Base temperature | 7°CBelow this, the plant accumulates no growing degree days at all. |
|---|---|
| Degree days to maturity | 900 °C·dThe heat budget it must accumulate before it is ready to pick. |
| Comfortable range | 10–26°CWhere it grows without stress. |
| Frost damage below | 0°CLeaves start taking frost damage below this low. |
| Killed below | -2°CBelow this it does not come back. |
| Heat stress above | 29°CAbove this the plant slows down and stops setting fruit well. |
| Typical time to harvest | 80–100 days |
| Yield per bed | 15 potatoes |
Things worth knowing
- The tuber is a swollen underground stem, not a root — and the world's 4th biggest staple crop.
- Light turns potatoes green and bitter with solanine — that's why you hill up the soil.
Where and when to sow Potato
Pick your city to see the months when Potato scores well against that city's real climate records: