Dear Gil, Good stuff.
But I'm not nursing potatoes on high compost stuff. I plant them direct in spading machine spaded soil and no fertilizer whatsoever. So they have to get off to a great start on their own. My experience is give them a good solid boost from the chunck of potato behind them and you can rely on getting a good yield. I can't afford poor yields. And I can't afford hauling out compost when potatoes given H2O2 and 500 will get it in gear like gangbusters without compost given a little hay mulch. So I'm not talking what wonders can happen, but what wonders can easily, reliably result in good yields. If I were a potato breeder working with tissue samples and cloning in petri dishes I would be taking it a step further than Kieth Gross, who was, of course, right on target with what he was doing. Best, Hugh >Hi! Hugh, > >Thank you for posting how to on spuds. > >This may be of interest to the list. > >Back in the 1940s or 1950s, a cousin of my mother's, Keith Gross, won the >Australian record for amount of potatoes grown from one pound of seed potato. >He was a mixed farmer from Clarendon, Adelaide, South Australia. As I recall, >he produced 32 CWT from One Pound. He split each eye into four and turned in >ten inches of well composted cow manure. It was supervised by the Local >Agricultural Bureau. It stood for many years, but eventually bettered by some >one in the US. > >To check it out I have actually split eyes into four and they will produce >viable plants. > >Gross's ancestry was that of the early migrants from the part of what was then >Germany and is now part of Poland and may well have had some of the same >traditional knowledge as RS. > >That family was among the best farmers in our area. > >Gil > > >Hugh Lovel wrote: > >> 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?
