Ah, Potatoes, Potatoes

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

So, at the very mention of potatoes, potatoes, all the kindest, most pleasant, tasty, homemade, some cute summer song about this vegetable garden crop comes to mind. These are the advice of experienced gardeners we have collected here for better growth and harvest of the main heroine of the story - potatoes

How to grow potatoes "under a fur coat"?

This method of planting potatoes guarantees low labor costs for the gardener and a good harvest. Another name for the method is planting potatoes “under the straw”. The method is so simple and effective that it remains to be wondered why gardeners do not use it, preferring to plant potatoes using the old-fashioned method, it is more difficult, with hilling the beds, with the fight against pests and other labor costs.

Potatoes for planting should be used, as usual, sprouted. Only a small depression is made with a scoop for each tuber, or even some gardeners in general … lay out potatoes on the "virgin soil". It's good if there is rotted compost in this place. You can also safely lay out the tubers on it and cover them with the same compost with a layer of about 20 centimeters.

While mowing weeds on lawns, fighting weeds, most of them go to the compost heap, and some are laid out on potatoes. Potato sprouts can easily make their way through such a substrate, since it is rather loose. That is, potatoes grow by themselves "under a fur coat", warmed by the sun, supplied with good portions of oxygen, moisture from dew or rain.

With such abundant mulch, potato stalks grow thick, strong, tall over the roots, stacked on the ground, as they like and are comfortable. When blooming, you need to pick off the flowers from them. Until autumn, nothing else, except for laying mulch and light watering, if there is a summer drought, potatoes do not need.

If you want to taste young potatoes, you just need to remove some of the mulched material aside, take larger tubers and put the mulch back in place. During harvesting, the mulch is raked off by grabbing a bunch of a bush, and tubers are taken from it, which, by the way, will be very clean compared to those that are dug out of the ground.

And such tubers will not be spoiled by a wire beetle, since they are not in the ground, but above it. The wireworm cannot reach them in such conditions. It should be noted that the yield can depend on many additional factors - on what seeds were taken, how the potatoes were tended, what was the watering and how intense the heat was. But it is still worth trying such a simple method of growing potatoes on at least a couple of plots. Is not it?

Peeling potatoes in the spring for the garden

Store potato peels during the winter rather than throwing them in the trash can. The cleanings are washed in running water, scalded with boiling water to remove bacteria from them, laid out on a newspaper and dried on a windowsill, on a radiator. Or you can freeze them on the balcony, take them to the dacha and put them somewhere for now, if there is no particular desire to dry cleaning.

In the spring, the stored potato peelings must be poured into a plastic container and filled with water. Once soaked, they need to be mixed. And then add fertilizer to the beds with seedlings of cabbage, cucumbers, laying it out under each sprout. It is also good to put a little potato fertilizer in the hole where the vegetable crop will be planted and only then plant the seedlings in it.

You can feed the whole garden with such fertilizer. He is loved by such cultures as pumpkin, onion, zucchini. But tomatoes and other crops of the nightshade family should not be fed with potato peelings, since they have common diseases and pests.

What you need to know when choosing seed potatoes

When you are thinking of planting potatoes in your garden, it would be nice to remember a moment to which little attention is paid in our country. We are talking about the potato variety and its purpose. For example, in our country it is customary to say "I grow Dutch potatoes." And the gardener believes that that says it all.

But in fact, in the same Holland, our Russian concept "potatoes, they are potatoes everywhere" is not recognized. There are hundreds of varieties of potatoes for vinaigrette, for mashed potatoes, for making chips, frying, and so on. On the packaging for potatoes, there is always a warning about which dishes the potatoes are intended for, and what percentage of their boil-over and starchiness.

Therefore, our gardeners, experienced vegetable growers are advised to pay attention not only to the yield of potatoes, but also to its purpose, its taste, in order to ultimately get the result that you need.