Like every odd-numbered year, I did not buy seeding potatoes. I merely planted leftover potatoes from last year – those that were too small and too green to be edible. They were not as tiny this year as they were in 2023 so I might be getting slightly better results. Hopefully. I planted all three varieties that I was growing last year and this winter we did find some interesting things about them.
First, let’s talk about dehydrating potatoes for long-term storage.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
From left to right are the varieties Dali, Esme, and Marabel. As you can see, two of the three varieties tend to discolor to dark brown, sometimes almost black, when being dehydrated raw. We tried several things we found on the internet – blanching, washing them with water, washing them with vinegar – and none really helped. It is a purely cosmetic thing which does not bother me at all, especially not when used for making potato mushroom soup which turns dark brown from the mushrooms anyway. But since the Dali looks really nice, they could be potentially rehydrated and made into other foods – purree, cakes, etc, where the dark color might be off-putting. So we decided to dehydrate predominantly the Dali and we used the other two for immediate consumption and for making dumplings that can be frozen for later use.
Another interesting thing we found out this winter by accident was actually really surprising. Last year I wrote that the Marabel potatoes sprouted first from the ground and thus were most damaged by late frost. But they seem to be the most resistant to sprouting in the cellar – they remained fresh and unsprouted right until the end of winter when we ate the last of them. And even now when I was planting them, they had barely visible eyes whereas both Dali and Esme had long, leggy sprouts all over them.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I originally planned to bury them in the compost but I changed my plans and decided to try to grow spinach in that place instead, so I had to repeat my experiment from 2023, only without the planting patch being properly prepared over winter. I simply put the potatoes on the lawn in rows of 10 and then put both old and fresh moss and grass clippings between the rows, doing my best to not damage the long sprouts on Esme and Dali (in the picture are Marabel).
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I put a little soil on top of the rows to cover the potatoes. After they sprout out of the soil I will put more moss, grass clippings, and soil in the rows again to cover them even more. Overall I made three patches circa 3×3 m, each with 80 potatoes. I will probably have to add some highly diluted mineral fertilizer into the water for these patches in order for them to have an adequate amount of nitrogen since there was not enough grass and way too much moss.
It was a whole day of work and I hope it will pay off. I have no reason to think it won’t. I won’t get as much per potato as I would if I buried them in the compost but I hope to get at least 40 kg of potatoes from each patch even so. We shall see how that turns out. Right now we have enough dehydrated potatoes (circa 50 glasses) for making soups for a year and maybe more. The freezer contains enough potato dumplings for several months too, so we do not actually need to buy potatoes possibly until the harvest. Except if we want to eat french fries, for which these varieties are not suitable anyway.
While growing up I learned from my grandfather to cut seed potatoes up so that each piece contained an eye, and then plant the piece 2-3 inches into the soil. It meant fewer potatoes needed for planting because every potato had 3-5 eyes on them.
I can think of pros and cons of doing this, but I’m curious about your thoughts on using whole potatoes or cutting them up so that every eye has a chance to sprout.
@flex, I never tried that technique. It would certainly make no sense with these potatoes, they were already about half the size of proper seeding potatoes. From what I have observed, each sprouted eye on a potato means one plant. Cutting said potato in half only means those plants would be spaced more so I never considered doing it. A bigger field does not automatically translate into a bigger yield but it does translate into more labor. Plus the labor needed to cut the tubers and apply some desiccant to the cus to prevent rot. So unless I am presented with some really comprehensive evidence that cutting potatoes increases the harvest significantly, I ain’t doing it.
Rather than “hilling” potatoes, we used to dig a hole, put the potato in the bottom, and gradually fill in the hole.
@chigau, that method has an advantage over hilling -- the potatoes are a lot less likely to surface and get green. I did exactly that last year with my leftovers and I also planned to do it this year before I changed my mind. Because it is also more work than hilling and thus more suitable for small growing, not what I am trying to do here, i.e. to grow the most with the least effort. Also I can only do that in those parts of my garden where the soil is really, really thoroughly worked over.