Potatoes are one of the most widely used vegetables in the world and they are also extremely easy to grow in most cases at home you can usually produce the masses of tubers easily in your own backyard, however, sometimes you end up with very small tubers. So why does that happen?
There are several possible reasons why you may produce small potato tubers with the most common reasons being that you have harvested the potatoes too early or there is a lack of a key growing ingredient which may include water, sunlight, or nutrients in the soil.
Generally, if you give potatoes what they need they will usually produce reasonably sized tubers unless they are a specific variety such as a kipfler which produces relatively small potatoes. However, you should also note that if you are growing potatoes in grow bags rather than in the garden, generally the tubers are smaller due to the amount of space that they have available.
If you have ended up with relatively small tubers you may be wondering what things you can do to overcome the issue. These measures include;
- Chitting the potatoes
- Adding additional compost before planting
- Providing adequate spacing for the potatoes
- Earthing potatoes up as they are growing
- Watering the plants frequently
- Allowing potatoes to mature before harvesting
Chitting Potatoes
Chitting potatoes is a method that some gardeners employ and claim that it improves the yield of potatoes whereas others say it does nothing. However, the reason there is such a divide among gardeners is that the academic research indicates that chitting potatoes is effective in certain circumstances for improving the yield.
Chitting potatoes is a process where the potatoes are left out in sunlight for a few weeks prior to planting ideally in cool temperatures less than 40F. Exposure to light encourages the potatoes to begin to produce eyes and the beginnings of sprouts.
This method has been shown by academic research to be extremely effective in increasing the size of early potatoes in cases where you want an early harvest. This is because the potatoes are able to get going a little bit earlier and it means that the general mass of potatoes you harvest in the early stages is generally significantly larger.
However, if you are trying to grow main crop potatoes which are going to be allowed to grow to full maturity chitting has shown to have virtually no effect on the total yield. This is because the unchitted potatoes tend to catch up with the chitted potatoes throughout the season. So whether you apply this method is greatly dependent upon what you are trying to achieve with your potatoes.
Adding Additional Compost To The Soil
The other factor that is significant in the development of the tubers is the availability of nutrients which in most cases shouldn’t be a problem as potatoes are generally fairly forgiving in terms of the soil that they grow in. However, if you have had problems with potato size in the past it is advisable to add additional compost or rotted manure in the trenches where you plant the potatoes.
Spacing For Potato Tubers
When planting seed potatoes in your garden it is recommended for main crop potatoes that you plant them approximately 1 ft apart in trenches that are approximately 1 ft deep. The depth of the trenches as well as the spacing will play a significant role in the size of potatoes and the amount of potatoes that can be produced.
This is because any new tubers produced from the seed potatoes will grow above the depth of soil where the seed potatoes were planted. So having a depth of approximately 1 ft will help to increase the amount of space available for the plants to produce tubers.
Additionally, you can also cut the seed potatoes out in half to make the most of what you have purchased as this allows you to create more potato plants from a packet of seed potatoes. For this to be effective it is important to ensure that the potato sections planted are a reasonable size. Ideally, they should be at least an inch or two wide to ensure that you get a reasonable harvest.
Earthing Up Potatoes
Earthing up of potatoes which is sometimes referred to as mounding up of potatoes involves pushing soil up around the plants as they appear to create mounds. These mounds should cover the stems of the potatoes leaving only a small amount of leaves popping out of the top of the mound of soil.
This process has been shown to increase the number and size of the tubers that can be produced from a single potato plant because it increases the amount of space available for tubers to be created. Additional tubers will be created off the stems of the plants as they are covered in soil. Also because achievers are spending longer underground they will also be larger. Academic researchers indicated that the yield can be improved by approximately 50%.
In addition to providing additional space for the potatoes, mounding up will also improve the quality as it prevents the tubers from being exposed to light which can cause them to turn green. When potatoes turn green they become poisonous and cannot be eaten.
Watering Plants Potato Plants Regularly
The other important factor in growing potato plants is to ensure that they have adequate water to develop properly. To do this it is highly recommended that you water every couple of days if it has not rained, particularly when the weather has been hot to ensure that the potatoes remain constantly moist.
When Should You Harvest Potatoes?
To maximize the size of potatoes you should ideally be harvesting them once the plant has died back completely which will typically be 16 to 20 weeks after you plant them for main crop potatoes. If the plant has died back completely it means that the tubers will not get any larger and will sit in the ground for an extended period of time without a problem.
However, if you are trying to get an early harvest then the earliest you should be harvesting potatoes is a week or two after the plant is flowered because that means typically there will be reasonable size tubers at the base plants for harvesting.
To reduce the chances of pulling the potato plants to an early start by harvesting only one potato and see what the yield looks like. Typically, if you are growing early potatoes then you should be expecting a yield of around 1 lb per seed potato, however, if you are growing main crop potatoes to full maturity then it is common to see yields of around 4lbs per seed potato.
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