gixxerific wrote:4 -6 month's, well that is about how long it took for a few I missed last season to volunteer in my garden.
Yeah I changed up my garden this year and I now have some taters coming up in the bean rows.
It's a weed! Out it goes!rainbowgardener wrote:Yours isn't saying potato to me, but it is pretty!
I have noticed that on most potatoes there are eyes scattered around all over the tuber, but on one end sometimes there are 6 or more in a very small area. I sometimes cut some of those off just so there won't be too many shoots that close together. Two or three shoots seem to get along OK, but more than that and you get small spuds. Too much competition.Or, if I have plenty of seed potatoes, could I just cut out most of the eyes and leave 2-3 to grow?
TheWaterbug wrote:If I plant a seed potato with 6 eyes, and all 6 send up shoots, are those 6 plants? Or are they like 6 branches of one plant?
[img]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3552590/TooManyPotatoesQuestionMark.jpg[/img]
Should I thin them out?
So 24 days after planting, nearly all my potatoes are up. There's 1-2 missing from 3 of the varieties planted (out of 30 plantings), but the Yukon Golds were a failureTheWaterbug wrote:All the seed potatoes varieties looked fine when I put them in, except for the Yukon Golds. I got only 2 Yukon Gold potatoes from the Potato Garden for my $5, and they had eyes, but all the eyes were bunched up on the ends. I sliced them up a little bit, but I didn't want to have tiny little bits or wafer thin slices with eyes, so I was left with some largish chunks with no eyes.
I planted those anyway, but will they grow? Should I ask for replacement potatoes? Should I just not bother and fill in any gaps with the purples? I have lots of purples left over.
So I dug up the missing sites, and of the 8 missing plants, two were actually growing some roots, but hadn't broken the surface yet. So I apologized profusely and put them back in.TheWaterbug wrote:The other 7-8 [Yukon Golds] are MIA, but those were the pieces with no eyes, so that's not entirely surprising. Should I just cut my losses and replant with my leftover purples? They're just sitting in my shed, growing longer and longer shoots every day, almost as though they're mocking the Yukons' failure.
Thanks! I did what you did this year - kept adding soil little by little, not all at once. And now it's level with the ground. Now I don't know if I should keep adding soil so the soil goes above the level of the ground. Do potatoes just grow on the bottom at the roots or up and down the stalks?dtlove129 wrote:Rogue, this is my 2nd year and my first year trenching and hilling. Last year I just dug a trench and buried them. This year I did a foot deep trench and pulled in dirt as the plants grew. Once the trench was filled I kept hilling the plants by pulling in more dirt out of the middle of the rows. I heard some people saying their potatoes didn't do well this year, but mine are much better than last year.
I also through the P and K to them when I planted them and put more to them probably 4 weeks after planting them. As far as foliage goes it is up probaby almost chest high and have already bloomed. Only time will tell what kind of potatoes I actually get though.
So did you plant them already? I would plant the potatoes as deep as you would normally and leave the shoots exposed. Just give them some protection at first so they don't get sunburned and they should green/toughen up.It's a bit late to be asking, but how deep should I plant seed taters with long shoots? If there's 5" of straight, skinny, pale shoot, should I leave all/some/none of it in the air?
Thanks for this info. So how do you know when you can dig them if you want medium size potatoes? I put mine out in early March and the other day I dug around and pulled out 2 red potatoes around the size of baseballs. I don't need them much bigger than that. Last year I waited until the plant was dead and then dug, but I didn't know the information that you mentioned above.TZ -OH6 wrote:Commercial potato growers either mow the plants down or spray them with herbicides when the tubers are the size they want, so no, you don't have to wait for the plant to die naturally.
Think of that the next time you buy a bag of little red "new" potatos whose momma plants were murdered in the prime of their life.
In response to the hilling question you only need 8-10 inches of soil above the eye of the seed potato where the plant sprouted. Very few varieties will send out tubers above the first few inches of stem base and in my experience with those it doesn't matter how high you hill for them, they will still stick some tubers out of the dirt, but most will be deep.
For me, hilling helps keep my soil from compacting and that makes it easier to dig the spuds later.
I cover the hills with grass clippings to keep the weeds down and keep light off of any tubers that run wild.