Very few but VERY large potatoes??

[RegGuheert]

This year we planted five rows of 100 seeds quite intensively: about 8 inches apart. We also planted them a little lower in the soil than in previous years to try to improve our hilling, knowing full well that this might result in rot if we got a lot of rain.

 

Well, we DID get a lot of rain this spring, resulting in the two lowest rows having very few plants (~1/3 of those plants came up). The other three rows did not have 100% come up, but probably more than 75%.

 

Anyway, today I plowed up the lowest row which had gotten the most flooding. It had by far the fewest plants in it. What I got were very few but VERY large potatoes. The largest one weighed over 18 ounces, which is much larger than anything else I have seen around here!! Many others seemed to be around a pound.

 

Is this what would be expected from potatoes which do not have close neighbors? The reason I ask is that normally we would expect to get 3 to 4 half-pound potatoes from each plant. In fact, that is what I expect to get from the three best rows which we are leaving for harvest in November.

 

Any thoughts?

[Audrey]

No crowding. Plenty of moisture. If your soil is kind of fluffy to boot, then yep. That would do it.

[RegGuheert]

O.K. Thanks! Yeah, that pretty much describes it! In fact, down on the end where the giant potato grew, I had tilled in quite a bit of horse manure, so the soil there was extremely fluffy. I think that also contributed to the rot, since underneath the fluffiness was hard red clay. I'm pretty sure the flood waters simply went straight through the fluff and sat around the seeds in that area for quite some time.

 

It probably would have been better if I had spread the manure more evenly over the whole garden last year, but for various reasons it just didn't happen that way. We'll be adding a bunch more this year, so hopefully the whole thing will be more consistent in the spring.

 

Given the gradual slope that is there I suppose we could drain the bottom end of the potato garden to prevent the rot, but since we didn't have this problem the previous two years I think I'll stick with what we have for now. We typically have several heavy rains each year that flood the potato garden and I like that whatever silt is carried by the floods ends up in the garden. (The flood water is all from our property.) It's just that this year the floods happened most of the spring, so we were lucky to even get the potatoes planted! :tongue_smilie:

[livingnlearning]

sounds about right-I was wondering b/c I remembered you had clay soil but when you say you fluffed in horse manure in that area it all makes sense!

 

BTW I told my DH about your potato questions and he said amend the soil and water water water for a big crop! Potato harvest is about to start here-they killed the plants last week.

[OrganicAnn]

The variety of potato will also make a difference. Some potatoes will only grow to a certain size.