Permies' Potato experiments

Nancy Reading wrote:A new experiment for me this year.... I'm going to try growing potato plants from the sprouts. These were from large baking potatoes (I think maybe King Edward judging by the pink sprouts) that started sprouting in the box.

potato sprout

I've put three in a smallish pot to develop roots and will see how they get on. The potatoes were eaten - they were fine.

It turned out that I had plenty of my 'skye blue' potatoes so I don't need to propagate those, although I may do a few sprouts from those since I was concerned about some mottling on the leaves last year, that I think my be a virus. I've read somewhere that sprout propagation can help 'clean up' infected tubers, so it will be interesting to see if plants from the sprouts look healthier.

That should work, especially if the sprouts have started roots. I remember my grandfather saying that during the great depression they would peel the potatoes, eat the potatoes, and plant the peels! now that is real economy...

Except that the peels are the best part!

(But I guess if you're trying not to starve...)

More of an experiment than a project actually.....
I have been a container gardener for years now and I always built potato towers. This year I am trying a container method I got from https://www.youtube.com/@simplifygardening after watching him do a side-by-side potato grow project comparing in-ground growing versus growing in buckets. (the bucket yield was substantially higher than in-ground based solely on square footage of space used) I am also combining some ideas from https://permies.com/t/271511/Growing-potatoes-pine-needles by using the pine needles to keep the soil loose.

The first step was to collect a wheelbarrow full of pine needles and shred them in the woodchipper/shredder. I reduced a wheelie full of pine needles into about a half-sack of stuff.



This I combined with a bunch of our local sandy soil. I also mixed in an equal amount of my rich composted soil as well after I took this picture.




My first set of seed potatoes are red ones that started to chit in the pantry. I chose two small ones that I could cut in half and have two chits per half.



I set the cut halves aside to scab over for about 4 days.



Now for the container. I have a few of these composite barrels that are about the same size as what the guy (I think his name is Tony?) at Simplify Gardening uses. They are about 22 inches in diameter at the top, and 18 inches tall.



I put about 4 inches of pine needle and oak leaf mulch in the bottom to cover the drainage holes.



Then I added about 6-7 inches of soil mix and stood two potato seed halves with the chits pointed up.



Another layer of soil and two more seed potatoes offset 90 degrees from layer #1.



Another cover of soil and a few inches of mulch and a watered them in.



Wish me luck!

I’m slowly clearing a new patch. I think I’ll plant some potatoes there. Anyway I’m also thinking of trying planting extremely over-chitted potatoes sideways.

Well, I just started a new experiment.

I'm way behind on gardening because my back has been out of order for seven weeks. I'm at the point where I can do some simple work with care, but my physical therapist would really rather I just stay indoors and do her prescribed exercise routine and nothing else. Because I've been laid up, I have a bunch of unplanted potatoes I don't want to waste.



I also had a hole left in the ground from harvesting sunchokes last fall. So I grabbed a spade and dug out a spade's width trench about seven feet long leading from the hole south. It's rough work -- sometimes six inches deep and at others, twelve.



I transferred the spuds from the bucket to the trench and hole, roughly, trying to get coverage everywhere, much thicker than you'd normally want to plant, but that's part of the experiment!



Then I brought a bale of spoiled hay over from my supply-mound and used about a third of it, being careful to separate it so it could be fluffy instead of dropping slices in whole.



I expected to use the whole thing, but it took only about a third of the bale to fill the hole and trench up to ground level.



I left the rest nearby and now I'm sprinkling it to get everything saturated. If it sinks a lot, I'll add more hay. When I have plants emerging more or less up and down the installation, I'll shovel the sandy soil back in place over the hay and if the plants prosper, I'll add the rest of the hay after that.



Taters have a hard time penetrating the native soil -- it's a nice sandy loam for the top three inches or so but below that, it's both sand and painfully hard at the same time somehow. So I'm trying to give them a nutritious airy medium in which to grow while I work on the several-year project of improving the soil.

I'll report back!

At least they are in the ground now Christopher, my chits are still in a pot looking very leggy! I'm glad you're back is a bit better too. Hopefully you'll be in good order for the harvest.

I really love reading this thread. I always find myself coming back here to read for fun. So much wisdom and great interesting ideas. Keep on pushing the envelope!

I noticed I pulled the sprouted potato eyes in the ground and I noticed they started growing. Really tiny potatoes. Similar to planting the slips of sweet potatoes.

If I get the opportunity I want to try sprouting a bunch of eyes from one potato then plant the slips of those eyes.

Thanks for inspiring me with all the ideas and wisdom here.

I accidentally am doing an experiment this year with a purple early potato variety called Vitanoire.

Half I stored in my fridge overwinter in a brown paper bag marked, 'do not eat'.

The other half, I left in the ground all winter because I couldn't find all these dark purple potatoes even digging the beds over twice ..

The ones left in the ground are also not fed or earthed up, as they are amongst annual crops! But here at the summer solstice, some of them have produced bigger, taller plants than the ones & stored, chitted, planted & mulched. Of course, I don't know how big were the tubers I missed.

Photos soon ..

I am selecting for cold hardy potatoes that survive as a perennial in this climate (zone 5). All except a particular fingerling seem to have died. I don’t know who they are as in the name they are called, but last was a winter to test them.

Fortunately I still had a few of the special knobbly white potato from seed that is very productive, saved indoors.

Planting in Pine needle mix update.
I ended up getting some fingerling and Yukon Gold seed potatoes and needed to mix up a few more buckets of soil mix. Then a friend gave me 5 small russets that had started to chit.
I now have 8 buckets of what appear to be very happy potato plants. (And another pot with basil, green onions, and mizuna.)
This pic was taken June 15.

Now an update for my projects.

Some of the Baroque potatoes are ready for harvest and flowering. I rummage around under them and steal a few new potatoes now and then leaving the plant to continue. They didn’t survive the winter outside but the ones I kept inside did. I’d like to start seeds from their progeny with the hardy fingerling and see if something winter hardy and extremely vigorous and beautiful comes out but last year’s might have been lost. I am not sure if the pink potato ever survived. There might be one somewhere.

I waited until the first overwintered ones came up before planting the chitted indoor kept potatoes. They were stored horribly in a basket at room temperature. But somehow they mostly survived.

Up above, I posted about late-planting a bunch of very sprouted, wrinkly, rubbery tubers. I dug them today. I got roughly the same volume out that I put in along with a couple bunches of berries. So not An amazing success, but at least they’re edible now!

There were also enough yucky mushy ones that if they had been all good this would have been a substantial success. Maybe half again my harvest.

The only potato experiment I have queued up this year has to do with seed fermentation. I’ve left the berries I collected, intact and in a sealed jar that I vent when the lid gets puffy. My intent is to pour them out on bare soil, crush half the pile with a foot and then spade a light layer of soil over the mass. Usually, I blend the berries, let them ferment, blend more, pour off the fruit solids, decant the water, and dry them in the dehydrator. That works but it’s a lot of steps. If this works too, that seems like a win, though maybe not when the point is to share.

I recently started two potato chits in a 30 gal tub on my back porch in Galveston TX, extremely hot and humid.  Filled tub with potting soil and added compost.  Both were purchased at local Home Depot.  Just as leaves began to show ,so did a bumper crop of  "spores" of something appeared.   Currently looking to find out what this is and if its harmful in any way.  But beware of store bought compost.

I'm growing out my True Potato Seed (TPS) for the first time this year! I grow pink fir apple and a local variety given to me as 'sky blue' and both set berries. These seeds are actually collected from plants in 2024 and germinated fantastically well. I did have some Sarpo Mira seed from 2005 which did not germinate at all (no surprise there!). I sowed them like I did my tomatoes in a small seed snail:

TPS seedlings in seed snail

They were a bit overcrowded, and probably should have been transplanted a couple of weeks ago, but the seedlings look very healthy, so I think they'll be OK. To my surprise some of them appear to be forming little tubers already. I can see that some of the seedlings have a lot of red in the stems, and others are quite white. I'm not sure which variety the berries came from and whether they are a mixture (they may have crossed with each other too I suppose).

potato seedlings forming tiny tubers

So the seedlings are now in a larger seed snail. I'll grow them on for a few weeks and hope to plant them out at the end of the month before they get too  crowded again.

This is so exciting! That little baby tuber! Very interested to find out if they've crossed.  Best of luck!

I just ran across this video yesterday and thought it was worth lodging here as a pointer for others and a reminder to everyone to talk about potato experiments!

I'm experimenting for the first time with growing potato 'shoots' separate from the tubers.   This was initially an accident because I had two well-grown chits, rootlets included, fall off my tubers!

I've successfully grown on the shoots in a commercial multi-purpose compost (donated to our community garden).

I'd just planted the first one out - a gorgeous new second-early purple variety called 'Vitanoire' - when the weather unseasonably turned too cold again.  So I've protected it with some mulch.  (We've had about half our traditionally planted potatoes suffer leaf damage because the nights got several degrees centigrade colder than expected, now protected with fine horticultural mesh donated to the community garden).

So, interested to see how these turn out!

Nancy Reading wrote:Anyone fancy taking part in a potato experiment? For example, to chit or not to chit, when/how to plant, whether chits should be white or green and whether to earth up? What else could we include? Climate zone and soil type and moisture would be whatever we have as well.
Does it sound like fun?

My potato plot last year

It would be nice to point to our own results, because plants don't read books (or the interweb!)

I am trying a so called "Amish" method this year using towers and special spuds: burbank russet and german butterball....

Amish spuds