Potatoe Question

[The Mama Chicken]

Flyboy, if they're big I cut mine into pieces with a few eyes each and dust them with sulfur before planting, if they're smaller I would leave them whole and then there's no reason to dust them. We got our seed potatoes at Atwoods for $0.69 a pound.

*Small being maybe smaller than a chicken egg, big being anything bigger than a chicken egg.

 

[flyboy718]

Flyboy, if they're big I cut mine into pieces with a few eyes each and dust them with sulfur before planting, if they're smaller I would leave them whole and then there's no reason to dust them. We got our seed potatoes at Atwoods for $0.69 a pound.

*Small being maybe smaller than a chicken egg, big being anything bigger than a chicken egg.

Perfect! That is the exact size I got and they are all uncut and have at least one eye and a shoot coming up of of each.

 

[AllyRodrigues]

Walmart was about the same price as the local ones I bought from my hardware store...I just don't have very many local resources for them, though, so I grabbed them.

 

[grow_my_own]

Can I use just brown leaves for planting potatoes and no soil? I just read up on a past thread that talked about making wire potatoe cages and some people only use hay/straw. I have a ton of leaves that I picked up in my neighborhood and could use those.

No, you do not need soil to grow potatoes.

Two years ago, I had cleaned out my fridge one day, pulled the crisper drawers out and cleaned thoroughly (you know how stuff falls behind them), found a small selection of old, dried-up produce. There was ONE tiny dried up, old little red potato in the mix. Tossed the whole lot of old produce out into the compost pile (NO SOIL, just leaves and kitchen scraps and lawn scraps). A few months later, we noticed these beautiful, bushy green plants growing in the compost pile and pulled them up... LO AND BEHOLD, there was a buttload of potatoes & a whole root system and everything! It had grown in the compost pile from that one dried up little old potato from the bottom of my fridge! We got about 4 pounds of small, new potatoes out of it.

 

[flyboy718]

Well I made my round potatoe cages out of some old deer fence yesterday. I made two, they are 32" tall and about 28" in diameter. I planted my potatoes in them today. I put a layer of news paper down in the bottom then I mixed a bag of top soil with a bag of composted manure/humus and then several handfuls of leaves and mixed it all together in my wheel barrow. I then placed a layer about 3" or so thick in the bottom on top of the newspaper then placed the seed taters on top and then covered them up with another 4 inches or so of the same mix and then sprinkled a handful of leaves on top to help shed water. We shall see how they do!