Kitchen Garden Forum

In the past there have been postings that IKP do not perform very well.
IKP generally sends out one shoot so if left they will be very low performers.
When you are chitting the potato remove the first shoot and leave to chit again and you shoutd get from three to five shoots and this will produce an increased yield.
JB.

great, thankyou for sharing JB.

I will tell my potato growing friend.
is this peculiar to this variety or something that is common with other potatoes? (I don't unfortunately have eniugh space to grow them)

Good tip JB, I'll write it in my gardening log so I have it handy next year.

I am sure that this could apply to all varieties but if you are chitting potatoes and you have a single spud with only one bud. I feel it a pretty good bet that if that bud is removed all you would lose is a couple of spuds but you have a lot to gain. Remove it. Suck it and see!
If that works please write and say so. Years ago some people used to limit the buds to four buds and the thought behind that wasto get a reasonable crop of decent sized spuds. I do not subscribe to that theory.
JB.
BTW This is a very good year so far with spuds and we have been getting around the 25 ton mark to the acre and this is only the second year we have grown them. It is better yield than our trial run last year.

Thanks for the tip JB!

Glad to hear you've had a good harvest, always a gamble I would think growing spuds - they hide their secrets!

Westi

Dear All,
I would like to add to Johnboy's stratagem (which I have used and it does work) this information.

If you want good sized bakers or large spuds for winter storage then do the opposite to your main crop potatoes. Just leave one or two shoots, even going to the extent of scraping off other "eyes" before planting. I have done this with some success on Cara, Picasso, Desiree and Romano. If you do this you can plant closer together as well at 12" x 24" instead of at 15" x 30". So what I do is as follows I plant the largest of my sets with two sprouts left on them and plant maybe one or two rows at 15" x 30" for my bakers; then for the rest I leave one sprout and plant at 12" x 24". With the closer spacing you are getting almost three rows worth of sets into the space of two traditionally grown ones so your yield is not much less and you get very few small spuds

In my mind it is as if there are several "plants" trying to compete for space, food and water if you leave all the sprouts on a potato so it makes sense to me to take off some to allow the remaining ones to reach their full potential.
Regards Sally Wright.

I can see the logic for doing this to get baking sized potatoes, but I've had huge bakers from the Picasso this year planting them at 12" x 24" as I hadn't much space and just putting them in as they were. If I tried only leaving a couple of shoots to grow I would probably be entering the world's largest potato competition.

Hi Sall y,
A very interesting observation.
It seems that most people plant their spuds and accept what comes.
As previously stated we a growing potatoes commercially and last year was our trial run and this year we have seriously increased the acreage. Our crop is planted 15"x36" in line with the equipment we have but in a garden or allotment you really haven't got the space for our dimentions which are really due to mechanisation rather than any growing aspect. We have seriously under estimated the volume of the crop and have given ourselves the problem of storing the over capacity. We even lost quite a large area due to a cloud burst which lasted for about 6 hours and tracks became rivers not streams and went straight through the middle of one of our plantings.
Certainly in line of what you say it makes perfect sense to me to limit the amount you grow from a single plant and end up with quality rather than quantity.
JB.