Planting Potatoes--A Few Tips With smaller potatoes one may plant the whole potato, but with larger ones it is good to cut them up into "sets." Be sure to cut these up so there is a considerable chunk of potato as an energy source to kick off the new plant. Anything smaller than about the size of a grade A large egg is marginal.
One end of the potato will have a concentration of "eyes." If one plants a cutting from this end it sometimes will make a bushy plant with lots of little potatoes and no big ones. The opposite end will be where the stem was that fed the development of the potato. This stem scar is NOT an eye and won't sprout. Each set must have at least one eye and maybe it is preferable to strive for two. I spade my potato patch with my FALC spading machine so I have a series of 40 inch wide beds. If it was in grass or rye I do this every week for about three or four weeks, planning on planting around mid April in my region (which I guess is zone 7). Because everyone is buying out the stores for potato seed at this time I make sure to buy seed potatoes early. I store these on the porch so they stay cool and get a little light and do NOT develop spindly, long shoots that break off easily. After cutting my sets I soak them in a bath of hydrogen peroxide using a pint of drug store 3% in 5 gallons of water. Then I give them a dip in BD 500 and lay them out down the bed in a three row intensive pattern. The middle row is 20 inches from each side of the bed and about 2 feet apart per set. The side rows are parallel to each other and twelve inches from the center or eight inches from the edges. But the potato sets are offest 12 inches from the center row so the sets are spaced midway between the sets in center row. This looks like the arrangement of pips on dice for fives. When the bed is laid out I tuck the sets in with the eyes pointing up. Then I unroll a round bale of hay down the bed and try to even out the too heavy spots by spreading them on the too thin spots. After that I do nothing, other than mowing the paths between beds while the potatos are young, until I dig potatoes. I dig potatoes with my spring tooth harrows with its outer feet taken off. I have to make several passes to bring the potatoes all to light. Even then I inevitably miss a few, but it sure beats digging with a shovel. Best, Hugh >Mind sharing how you plant and manage your potatoes? > >I've been very disappointed with my crops the past two years. Doing >great on the freedom from bugs and pretty good on the freedom from >blight (last year I mis-identified a fungal attack for sunscald and >lost a whole row of a variety by responding two late. For whatever >reason, an application of equisetum tea brought the others through, >however. > > >Hugh tells me that he doesn't hill any more. He mulches with old hay. >(Anyone got good tips for unrolling big bales??) I've got lots of old >straw, but straw holds so much water, it kind of worries me to have >it around the spuds. I did lose a crop of spuds one year by apply hay >after the tops had come up: they melted away with fungus withing the >week. > >Woody's suggestion of dipping the cut pieces in a slurry of local >clay and BC has worked very well for us. I don't think we ever have a >cutting that doesn't result in a plant. > >A good geek question for me: my Albrecht report suggests two tons of >lime an acres. The area I want to put the spuds in has not been limed >(the pH is 6.8) and I'd like to lime it after I put the spuds in but >most sources say to not lime a spud patch because it leads to scab. >For myself, however, I can easily suspect that my low yields could be >attributed to not enough calcium-based lime in the soils (Ideas?) > >How do you do your spuds?
