Potato sprout question

[nao57]

So... every year we do potatoes in the garden. IF you do them right they are one of the best things you can grow for the lowest amount of square footage with highest food yield. I would encourage others to do them also.

That being said I've had years where they don't do well and years where they did well. I like gardening and its nice to cut down the grocery budget.

However... here are 2 issues we have to work on.

#1 is that if you have clay soil, it can make the soil too compact around the potatoes and this will restrict their ability to expand, grow, and spread out their shoots. I hope you can watch for this and be careful. Supposedly you can fix this by mixing in wood mulch, chopped straw, hay, or wood chips, etc. Anything you can do to mix in with the soil so it will be healthy enough to let them send their tubers out. (If you have any suggestions I didn't think about on this feel free to offer any insight or advise.)

The second thing I wanted to ask about (#2), was about sprouting smaller potatoes....?

So when we grow the potatoes every year, there are some that just don't grow very big, often this is because of issue #1, but sometimes this happens because of late starts, or just they didn't take off right. So you can end up with your fairly normal size potatoes and then your little bite size golf ball or smaller size potatoes. I wanted to get advise on if these little extra tiny spud tubers can sprout and be used as seed potatoes as effectively as the larger ones? I think you understand the question right? It makes to think, OK if I have 2 potatoes and one is the size of a brick and one is the size of like half of a baseball... if they both can sprout the same then it would make sense to eat the bigger ones and use the smaller ones for seeds.... UNLESS there's a flaw in this logic? I'm curious what you think and might say about this?

Also, just I would encourage as many of you as you can to do victory gardens this year. But don't tell everyone about them. People have a way of causing trouble when they get jealous. And when people are paying 20 bucks for bread or 20 bucks for a gallon of milk they won't be laughing then.

Thanks for any advise on these 2 issues.

 

[Acre4Me]

Anything you can do to mix in with the soil so it will be healthy enough to let them send their tubers out. (If you have any suggestions I didn't think about on this feel free to offer any insight or advise.)

Sand, although hard to mix it in really well. aged compost, but takes time. Vermiculite. Perlite. Peat moss.

There is a dairy a few miles away. With various regulations, they dry the poop, and it looks like peat moss in texture. They are happy to give it out for free. We’ve added this, great for breaking up the soil. It seems pretty devoid of nutrients though, so it’s not like adding aged manure.

Good luck

 

[Chris2018]

Save your wood mulch, chopped straw, hay, and wood chips and make compost then add the compost to the garden.

Potatoes have no problem growing in clay soil, you will just have to work a bit harder to get the outcome as someone with a more ideal soil.

Watch your pH, most clay soils are alkaline having a pH of 8.0 to 10 (you want a pH of 5.0 to 6.0)
Don't over work your soil and don't work the soil when it is wet, you're just going to matters worse.
Watch your watering, just because the soil is dry and cracked on top doesn't mean the soil is dry down 4 or 5 inches under the grown.
Hill your potatoes regularly.

The best thing you can do for clay soil is add organic matter.
Compost
Cover crops
Green Manures
Living Mulch
These 4 things will do wonders for improving/ correcting clay soil.

As for big potatoes vs little potatoes, in my eyes they eat and grow the same.

 

[HollowOfWisps]

What I do for potatoes is in the fall after harvest I cover my potato area in whatever composted straw and wood chips I have had sitting out all year. Usually I get a good 4-5” on there then and let it sit all winter. I have to cover mine with garden fabric otherwise the wind blows it away. In early February/march we usually have a couple of days where the ground warms up enough that I can pull off the fabric and use my tiller to work it in deeper. Then I cover it back up and wait until April when I plant.

 

[Sally PB]

As far as size goes, I eat the big ones, and save the small ones to plant the next year. When I plant, I look for "eyes" on the potatoes and try to pick the best ones. Though I got a couple of these this year:

Holy Franken sprouting potato, Batman!

 

[HollowOfWisps]

As far as size goes, I eat the big ones, and save the small ones to plant the next year. When I plant, I look for "eyes" on the potatoes and try to pick the best ones. Though I got a couple of these this year:

Holy Franken sprouting potato, Batman!
View attachment 3469617

Yes I forgot to add that I do the same thing. Eat the big ones and use the small ones as my seed potatoes.

 

[HollowOfWisps]

As far as size goes, I eat the big ones, and save the small ones to plant the next year. When I plant, I look for "eyes" on the potatoes and try to pick the best ones. Though I got a couple of these this year:

Holy Franken sprouting potato, Batman!
View attachment 3469617

It’s got two chicken feet coming out of the bottom

 

[nao57]

Sand, although hard to mix it in really well. aged compost, but takes time. Vermiculite. Perlite. Peat moss.

There is a dairy a few miles away. With various regulations, they dry the poop, and it looks like peat moss in texture. They are happy to give it out for free. We’ve added this, great for breaking up the soil. It seems pretty devoid of nutrients though, so it’s not like adding aged manure.

Good luck

Thank you very much.

Steer manure dried out works very well from what we've seen. Some people prefer it. Not sure why it would be devoid of nutrients.

 

[nao57]

Yes I forgot to add that I do the same thing. Eat the big ones and use the small ones as my seed potatoes.

Thank you.

 

[nao57]

What I do for potatoes is in the fall after harvest I cover my potato area in whatever composted straw and wood chips I have had sitting out all year. Usually I get a good 4-5” on there then and let it sit all winter. I have to cover mine with garden fabric otherwise the wind blows it away. In early February/march we usually have a couple of days where the ground warms up enough that I can pull off the fabric and use my tiller to work it in deeper. Then I cover it back up and wait until April when I plant.

That's a cool trick. I like it.

And that makes sense to do that you could put much of the biodegradable waste in there over winter. And it would work unless you live with someone who is OCD with cleaning obsessions.