Potato sprout question

[nao57]

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.

Thank you.

 

[Chris2018]

Thank you.

Your Welcome

 

[akroberts1085]

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.

I would grow them in grow bags or 5 gallon buckets. You can build some wood boxes and make it high enough to be off the ground.

 

[CatInTheHenHouse]

I would grow them in grow bags or 5 gallon buckets. You can build some wood boxes and make it high enough to be off the ground.

How deep do they need to be? I buried a few in one of my garden boxes last year and the resulting crop were rather lackluster in size, I’m not sure if it was the soil, the depth, the weather or something else.

 

[akroberts1085]

I read that potatoes should be put in 6 inches of soil then add another 6 inches and then add more potatoes. Depends on the size of the bag.