How To Grow Potatoes From Sprouts?

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

There are potato beds in every vegetable garden, it is not for nothing that they say that potatoes are the second bread. Any summer resident invariably dreams of a good harvest of potatoes, because it can be so great to fry a whole frying pan of delicious potatoes, or to boil it and serve it with pickles or spicy herring! The good news: you can get excellent yields not only when growing potatoes from whole tubers or from eyes - growing this crop from sprouts also gives impressive results

How do you get sprouts?

Growing potatoes from sprouts is a very effective and enjoyable way to get great yields. It is especially convenient to grow valuable potato varieties in this way. The only thing that scares some summer residents is that in this case, potatoes have to be grown through seedlings, that is, in order for everything to work out in the best possible way, they will need to make some effort.

To get sprouts for subsequent seedlings, it is necessary to select even and large enough potato tubers without any damage. Before they are planted, they are germinated in diffused light and a temperature of sixteen to eighteen degrees for four or five weeks. Ideally, seedling tubers are laid about two weeks before the start of the standard potato planting dates. Having laid the pre-selected uterine tubers in the grooves, they are immediately covered with soil mixed in equal shares with humus and watered moderately. In this case, the tubers are placed in the ground at a distance of five millimeters from each other.

What's next?

Gradually germinating, each potato bud gives a sprout, that is, an shoot. As soon as the first shoots begin to appear and the groove turns green, the soil is immediately raked in order to quickly separate the sprouts with roots from the tubers - it is they who will subsequently allow you to get an impressive harvest. And all sprouts that have not yet given leaves or have not come out into the light should be left on the tubers. The grooves are cleared again and, having thoroughly loosened them, return the uterine tubers to their original place and thoroughly cover them with earth. In ten days the second batch of seedlings will be ready for harvesting, and then the third will arrive in time. By the way, the flowering of bird cherry or the blooming of birch leaves can act as a guideline for planting potatoes in a seedling way.

We plant seedlings

The resulting potato seedlings are planted one by one in pre-treated and well-fertilized areas. Between the sprouts of the first stage, a distance of thirty centimeters is maintained, and between all the others - twenty-five centimeters. If the soil is too dry, each sprout must be watered (at the rate of 500 ml of water per sprout).

Do not forget that the sprouts separated from the tubers are deprived of their vital supply of nutrients, respectively, it must be compensated by abundantly fertilizing the soil. If this condition is met, the seedlings will grow together after ten days, and after a while, the "seedling" potato bushes will be indistinguishable from the bushes grown from tubers. Despite the fact that these varieties of bushes are characterized by unequal growth rates, they always bloom at the same time, and the tubers on them are also formed at the same time.

What about a large area?

Some summer residents can boast of rather impressive plots, respectively, such people will have to plant potatoes in a real mini-field. In this case, the tubers, as well as their eyes, tops and quarters, are planted in greenhouses or warm ridges about a month before the main planting. It will be useful to add humus or peat to the soil. And with the onset of heat, the sprouts that have already reached fifteen centimeters in height can be safely transplanted to the desired area (before removing them from the soil, all sprouts should be well watered).

Too many sprouts usually form a dense turf, so they should be pulled out in dozens of pieces at once (without dividing), dipping each bunch into prepared organic fertilizers and making sure that the roots are completely saturated with them. And only then the sprouts are planted in the soil. Do not forget about proper care - plants must be constantly taken care of and provide them with reliable protection from pests. Only in this case will the harvest really please!