Everyone, from ancient times, is familiar with the classic method of planting potatoes: we throw the root crop into a hole and bury it. Few people then think about plant nutrition, saturation with sunlight, etc.
But it turns out that if you do everything “smartly”, then there is 1 trick that will not require additional financial costs, and will increase the final harvest by more than 2 times!
Required:
- potato;
- sharp knife.
How to Increase Potato Yield Using the Scientific Method
It's much easier to plant whole potatoes - you don't need to waste time cutting and preparing. In addition, some gardeners believe that making a cut in a potato can cause an infection. And then, at best, the entire bush will produce an infected crop. At worst, it won’t exist at all.
But, as experience shows, cut potatoes can be stored in a dark place, at a temperature from +12 to +15. And even after 10 days it will not rot or deteriorate.
To check this, boil potatoes cut 10 days ago and see what happens to them.Boil in their skins in plain water. Once cooked, peel all sides and look at the inside of the potatoes. The peel reliably protected the vegetable, it retained its fresh appearance and did not rot. This means that gardeners’ fears that cut potatoes will spoil are in vain.
Why cut potatoes before planting?
One of the reasons – large size of tubers. Sometimes it is impossible to plant potatoes weighing, for example, 600 grams. In this case, it is logical to cut it into several parts.
The second reason – insufficient number of eyes on potatoes. It is the eyes that give roots. If there are not enough of them, the potatoes will not germinate. By cutting a vegetable, we increase the likelihood of eyes appearing before planting.
It is not correct to plant tubers at a distance of 40-50 cm from each other. A better option is to leave about 1 meter of space between plants.
How to cut potatoes?
When cutting, first of all, look at the location of the eyes (sprouts). If 1-2 sprouts break during cutting, then nothing bad will happen. But be careful not to touch the sprouts. Cut the potatoes so that there is one sprout on each cut piece.
But it doesn't always work out that way. Therefore, if there are 2-3 sprouts on one of the parts, leave it like that.
When planting in a hole, place one part of the potato with two sprouts and one part with three sprouts. Is it possible to plant one piece with five sprouts at once? Yes, but in this case the harvest will be much worse, by 15-30%.
When planting potatoes, make a hole with a diameter of 20 cm.and a depth of 20-25 cm. In the hole, place the potato parts as far apart as possible from each other, with the cut inward.
If the potato sprouts are small, then you do not need to cover them completely with soil. Sprinkle it halfway, and after a week, add it all the way through. If the sprouts are large, up to 10 cm high, then you can fill the hole at one time.
Why do planted four parts of a potato with one sprout produce a greater yield than planted one tuber with four sprouts? Because the largest sprout on a tuber with four sprouts will pull all the nutrients onto itself. The remaining sprouts will get a small part. And tubers with one sprout develop evenly.
