Spacing Potatoes

[Colin Miles]

I can either plant 4 rows of 15 potatoes, or 5 slightly wider spaced rows of 12. Which would be best, or would there be no difference?

By the time you answer I will probably have decided, but interested to know your replies.

[oldherbaceous]

Afternoon Colin, i would always rather plant the potatoes closer, and leave more room between the rows. Doing it that way, it is a lot easier to pull extra soil up over the rows.
This especially applies to late potatoes.

[Westi]

I space mine wide enough to get the baby rotavator between the rows. I then earth up really quickly by whizzing the rotavator between them. It seems to work really well if the soil is not too wet as it is a fine, doesn't damage any existing foliage and you get two rows done at a time. The next time I go along the alternate rows. This is actually wider than the recommended so only good if you have the space.

Westi

[Cider Boys]

Surely it depends on how wide the rows are and how close together the spacings are. For allotment/gardening planting main crop I would compromise around 15" spacings and 30" rows and for new 12" spacings and 24" rows (although in field conditions the rows would be wider apart due to machinery requirements).

Barney

[solway cropper]

Why bother planting in rows?
For such a relatively small amount you could just plant them in a block and mulch them as they grow instead of earthing up. With this method first earlies can go at 12 inches between plants and maincrops at 18 inches between plants. It works, honest.

[Colin Miles]

Thanks for the replies. I have opted for the wider spacing between rows as this aids hoeing up.

Solway Cropper - may be a relatively small number but still occupying around 17 ' x 11', so would need rather a lot of mulch. I've got 3 compost bins on the go but I don't think there would be enough material even there.

[Johnboy]

My advice would be for early varieties 12" twixt spuds and 24" twixt rows and for main-crop 15" twixt spuds and 36" twixt rows but if space is at a premium the main-crop can go as low as 27".
You must always leave sufficient soil twixt rows to allow for adequate earthing up. Early varieties do not need the same amount of earthing up.
JB.

[Monika]

Sounds very idle, I know, but I always plant all the potatoes (early, main and late crop) 12" apart in rows 3' apart. I have already marked out the rows, but the potatoes won't go in until well into April because we can get frost in early June, so it's not worth risking. That is one of the reason for keeping the rows so far apart, so that we have plenty of soil to cover up the early emergers!

We do have a few potatoes (Nadine and Kestrel) already planted in bags in the greenhouse, just for fun really.

[solway cropper]

A lot of 'recommended' spacings are based on commercial practice and are not really applicable to the small scale producer.

My earlies are now all in and in one bed I have 39 spuds in a space of five square metres. Like Monika I also have a lot of bags in the greenhouse which should give us our first crop by the end of April.

You can mulch with grass mowings or scrunched up newspaper...you don't need soil or compost.

When I was a young lad I worked as a gardener for a large country house and in the intervening years I've been happily unlearning a lot of the cr*p I was told there.

[Johnboy]

Solway Cropper.

A lot of 'recommended' spacings are based on commercial practice and are not really applicable to the small scale producer.

Of course these spacings are originally based on Agricultural principles and many agricultural practises are base on gardening principles and these spacings are based on best practice to achieve the best possible crop from a given area.
What is the crucial factor for the amateur gardener is the amount of ground the gardener has available.
There are several ways to produce potatoes but the best way is to follow normal best practice. Because you have five square metres to waste doesn't mean that your method is any better than best practice and I have serious doubts as to whether you would fair as well.
If your described method suits you then that's just fine but we have many people new to gardening using this forum and I feel that we should stick to conventional methods and keep to widely known methods.
How sad that you were given the opportunity to learn, when you were a lad, and it appears that you have thrown that opportunity away.
If, in your five square metres, you can better the equivalent to sixteen tons to the acre I would be very much more than surprised.
JB.

[John]

SC What you describe as c**p most of us will call experience and experience is a great teacher.
For spacing another point to consider is the amount of top growth particular varieties have. I once grew a row of a type called Dunbar which had huge foliage and sprawled everywhere, swamping its neighbours. Earlies are generally quite compact.

John

[solway cropper]

Oh, I seem to have rattled a few cages here. I learned a great deal as a lad and have never stopped learning. That doesn't mean that what I was taught was correct. The only way we learn anything is to try it and then see if there's a better way.

I've been gardening for the best part of fifty years and have worked as a gardener and in farming and forestry so growing things is not something new to me.

I was talking to a chap the other day about growing veg and he said he learned everything from his grandad and if it was good enough for him......To me that shows a mind that is stuck in a rut.

Working from typical yields that I get in a fairly small space I could achieve 30-40 tons per acre, depending on weather, if extrapolated to a commercial scale. The only trouble is it would not be feasible with mechanized equipment and does require a very fertile soil and a fair bit of work.

To repeat. If you have a small area to grow your spuds in then forget conventional wisdom but be prepared to experiment.

[Johnboy]

Hi SC,
Yet another sad comment.

I was talking to a chap the other day about growing veg and he said he learned everything from his grandad and if it was good enough for him......To me that shows a mind that is stuck in a rut.

I too was taught how to garden by my grandfather who was a stockbreeder and farmer and the finest gardener I have ever known.
I wonder just how many of us were taught to garden by our grandfathers who back in those days had to rely on themselves to find out the best methods by experimentation.
Why the length of time you have been gardening should enter this thread beats me but if we are now reduced to bragging in a few days time I will enter my seventieth year of gardening and whilst we're play the old soldier I did 25 years in the armed services and on retirement entered university to study horticulture. At present I am farming and have a considerable stretch of woodland and just to complete the old soldier bit I now have a limp.
So you recon that your thirty-nine seed potatoes could yield 303lbs because that is what you would have to do to achieve 40 tons to the acre. Now we are back to the old soldiers again!
Although I was taught by my grandfather to a very high standard in every one of my years gardening I have done at least one experiment and in some years several experiments. Some work some don't and when they don't work it's back to my grandfathers methods because his methods always worked.
JB.

[FelixLeiter]

Spacing can, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the variety, determine the size of your tubers. Closer spacing gives smaller potatoes, while a wider spacing yields larger spuds. This is primarily why early potatoes, where size is not so important and where they are often harvested before they reach their potential maximum size, are spaced closer than maincrop potatoes. It is also possible to reduce the number of tubers yielded per plant by rubbing out some of the seed potato's eyes at planting time to give fewer, but therefore potentially larger, tatties.

[Geoff]

The place I normally go when thinking about vegetable spacing is "Know and Grow Vegetables" from the National Vegetable Research Station (published 1979 and I think long out of print). When it comes to Potatoes they discuss it over 5 pages so I can't reproduce it all.
Their general conclusion for most vegetables is that even spacing over the whole area usually gives the highest yield per unit area, pretty logical really. The difficulty with Potatoes is 'what is a plant?' - each eye is effectively a plant so what you need to control is the distribution of eyes. This gives their first conclusion that the smaller the seed potato the better as larger seed lead to clumping. Clumping has two drawbacks; it reduces yield through local overcrowding and the competition forces tubers upwards where they grow less well. Eyes can be more evenly spaced either by using small seed or cutting bigger ones, this is not such a good option as you get less eyes for your money with bigger seed.
In a farming environment general practice has been to plant 1 ton of seed per acre but if you use small seed this can fall to 6 cwt per acre for no loss of yield.
They have concluded that the optimum planting density is 2 to 3 eyes per square foot for Maincrop.
Earlies introduce an extra problem in that the food reserves of the seed are more important particularly if they have to recover from frost. This dilemma is resolved by using larger seed but with fewer eyes per seed (the go into methods of achieving this without rubbing off at the last minute) ending up with approximately the same plant density of 2 to 3 per square foot.
This is the table they have produced to help planting decisions, notice it is based on 30 in row spacing - they don't discuss different row spaces!

POTATOES.jpg (83.1 KiB) Viewed 7319 times