I know it’s common to mulch over seed potatoes when growing them. What about TPS? I plan on growing some potatoes from true seed this season without using tillage to plant or harvest. I have some ideas of how I want to do this, but I figured I’d be well-served by asking around first.
Any ideas?
When I’ve grown TPS, I started them in a potting mix indoors and when it was time to plant them out, I pulled away the mulch, set their pod of soil in and back-filled around it with fresh compost before tucking a little mulch back in. But I also got pretty light bounty in most cases – just enough to taste a tuber from each and cellar the rest for planting the following year. There might well be better approaches.
Thanks for sharing your experience! I’ll definitely consider this approach. From what I remember, according to Gabe Brown in Dirt to Soil, smaller tubers/lighter yields are typical of no-till potatoes grown from seed potatoes
My experience has been similar to that of Christopher, though I’ve only done one tray. It was a mesh bottom tray and I actually just planted the whole tray on the ground and put a little more dirt around the plants.
I got a handful of tiny tubers from under the tray and a few from inside the tray. But I also had to harvest them early because I was moving so…
I would be interested if anyone has anything to say about maximum yield from seed grown potatoes.
My best first year yield from TPS was about a quart and a third of pleasantly small tubers. This image doesn’t show the amount well, shot from the top, but I couldn’t find a better one. I know that sometimes people get genuinely good yields in the first year, but I think it’s plainly rare.
I’m really dependent on tillage for all my potatoes so I can’t comment on that. I did do a trail (was with tuber grown) where a section of multiple rows didn’t get hilled. The yield was much lower. It’s like potatoes love getting hilled, seems like consistently have a growth spurt. This spring for my TPS seedlings I used a wheel hoe for hilling, and besides making more space for tubers, they get weeded, and also the extra benefit was that I covered all the small seedlings because I planted them a little close together. I suppose one could do the same with mulch, but not at my scale and my lack of enough time+ materials. Next year I want to reduce tillage more than I did last couple years in general, but I don’t see it happening with my potato patch.
For yield, my first year I got like 5x higher yields than in 2022 (yields in 2021 were up to 11 lbs for some plants!) , so I’ve thought about the reasons why quite a bit. They really need to grow fast in the spring and have good growth, because once they start flowering the growth slows way down, and they don’t have enough photosynthetic capacity to develop bigger tubers. One theory I have that is probably wrong for my season in 2022 is that it was so cloudy in the spring that the lack of sunlight triggered them to start flowering earlier than would have been preferable. It wasn’t a lack of water, or fertility, because the exact same thing happened in a couple rows that had more compost (and I irrigated regularly) I’m going to try to figure that part out in 2023! The seeds that I sent out were mostly berries from tubers that I had saved from and replanted from the best in 2021, so the potentially big yielding (in my climate anyway) and colorful selections.
This discussion I posted this morning talks about no till potatoes a bit. How to deal with slugs/crimping a cover crop - #2 by Landrace
What seeds are people starting with? Like, Cultivariable’s ‘wide tetraploid mix’ or ‘wide high dormancy diploid mix’, or are you going more for specific varieties from the beginning?
I planted a mix of Cultivariable’s wide and red tetraploids and stuff I got from the Kenosha Potato Project “beginner train”.
Cool. I’d love to see any harvest photos if you’d like to share!
To show you harvest from this year, I think the easiest thing would be to point you at this thread on Permies and suggest you scroll up one image and then almost all the way down the thread: https://permies.com/t/190854/documenting-calories-grown#1608773. But I can also include a harvest shot from last year:
Wow thanks @clweeks , your garden looks like paradise! Lovely to see all of those photos. I was curious, your spinach, the leaf looks quite like Japanese spinach rather than the spinach we get in Europe. Is that normal in the US or, does yours maybe have Asian genetics?
And yeah thanks for showing all your potatoes there, as well as everything else! Wonderful. Those (cardboard?) tubs for keeping each plant’s potatoes in look really handy too.
