Super Elite Potato Mini Tubers Give Great Results

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Elite variety - high yield

I have been doing potatoes for many years. This is one of my favorite vegetable crops. It seems that you know a lot about varieties and agricultural technology, but every year you discover something new for yourself. Increasing the yield of any crop is facilitated by growing its harvest from varietal material.

Without the right varieties, it is more difficult to get excellent quality tubers, but even the best variety is not a magic remedy. In the same area, but on different soils, this variety shows itself in different ways. In addition, about 50 fungal, 10 bacterial and 30 viral diseases were detected on potatoes. They can negate all the efforts of the gardener. Where is the exit?

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Last winter, by a lucky chance, I received a catalog of vegetable crops from the "Garden and Vegetable Garden" NGO from the city of Chelyabinsk. In this collection there was a short article about a new method of growing quality seed material. Healthy, virus-free mini potato tubers are grown on a three-year basis under sterile conditions (super-super elite, super-elite). From these mini-tubers of the super-elite reproduction, the potato elite is obtained, i.e. the offspring of the best selected plants of a certain variety. Planting such potatoes guarantees maximum yield, even with traditional agricultural practices, for five years. Unfortunately, after four years of planting, the yield of the tubers will decrease.

I also wanted to grow new varieties. I made an order to the firm. From the proposed options, I chose early ripening varieties: Alvara, Baron, Kamensky, Breeze; early - Rosara, medium ripening - Skarb, late - Zhuravinka. Different breeding schools have their own advantages and disadvantages, so I did not dwell on one. Alvara, Rosara and Baron are German varieties, Breeze, Zhuravinka and Skarb are Belarusian, Kamensky is Ural.

I made an order and waited. The package arrived when I had already stopped waiting - June 7th. The super-elite tubers were the size of a quail's egg and had small sprouts. I passed them according to instructions for several hours at Kornevin. Stimulating root formation seemed important to me, since the planting dates have already passed. Just in case, I kept the tubers in the shade for two days in wet washed sand, before planting I treated them with Fitosporin so as not to bring other people's diseases to my soil.

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On June 10, I started landing. I want to say about the land in our summer cottage. Gardening is located in the area of the city of Lyuban - the Trubnikov Bor massif. These are former high acidity cranberry bogs. My site is in two parts. The first is the same cultivated peat, and the second is loam, mostly consisting of blue clay.

For many years my husband and I have been trying to refine this clay. There are some shifts, but sometimes it seems to me that, as they say, things are still there”. Every year, 2-3 times we process the soil with a walk-behind tractor, preventing weeds from developing, and add sand. For the last two years we have been sowing green manure in this area. As soon as they grow 30-40 cm, the husband plows them into the soil.

The result is not clay, but a rather "fluffy" substance. It was in this soil that I planted my mini-nodules. There were only 64 of them, so I formed eight rows with a distance of 80 cm between them. Why so much? First, for better sunshine. Secondly, the clay quickly compresses, so I put all the weeded and cut grass in the aisle. The distance between the holes was 35 cm. The planting depth was set at 20 cm. In each hole I poured compost, a handful of ash, one teaspoon of Pochin wireworm remedy, a pinch of Kemira Potato universal fertilizer and a glass of sand into each hole.

I mixed all this in the hole, made a slide again, on top of it - a small depression. In this "nest" on a sand lining, I carefully put my babies so as not to break the seedlings. Again I added some sand, ash on top, and then covered it all with compost. The result was a pea 10 cm above the soil level. The potato itself turned out to be at a depth of about 15 cm. Then I performed this operation 63 times more carefully and carefully so as not to accidentally damage the nodules and sprouts. However, several potatoes were killed. It’s hard to say what was the reason: a long shipment or difficult weather conditions. I still think that tubers of this size should have been planted at a shallower depth.

One could often hear complaints about the late spring and cold summer, and this was indeed the case. Summer 2008 did not spoil us with warmth. Many cultures have not received enough warmth for their development. Despite this, my potatoes sprouted very amicably and quickly began to grow. After the first hilling, I fed the plant with the biological product "Gumi". After the second hilling, I repeated it again. The third and last feeding I made with the preparation "Bio-UD". I used this tool for the first time and was satisfied. It is made on the basis of horse dung.

When the potatoes bloomed, I cut off all the flowers. This agrotechnical technique, I was convinced from my own experience, really gives an increase in the mass of tubers. Indeed, in this case, the plant will not give up nutrients for seed formation to the detriment of the harvest. I have definitely used this technique when growing potatoes for many years.

To exclude the appearance of late blight, I always spray potatoes and tomatoes with Fitosporin twice at intervals of 7 days. Fortunately, there was no disease on my "testing ground". Two weeks before harvest, I cut off all the tops at a height of 30 cm so that the tubers form a solid rind and gain strength.

As a result, out of 58 emerging tubers of the super-elite, I collected 3.5 buckets of selected elite potatoes. Even in unfavorable weather conditions and at a sufficiently late planting, especially for late varieties, the tubers grew very large, healthy, without external defects and corresponding to their variety (according to the standard). With great difficulty, I scored one bucket of small tubers per seed (I prefer not to cut them apart when planting). I want to say that my husband and I in this "unsuccessful" summer from 125 square meters of plantings collected 14 buckets of potatoes, and planted three buckets of seed tubers. Among the 13 varieties were Egyptian, and Israeli (from the store), and from the Kostroma region.

Readers, of course, are interested in the taste of new varieties. They seemed to me very high. All seven varieties met my expectations and effort. Our big family gave a tasting and everyone also gave high marks to the novelties. Particularly tasty and beautiful was the Kamensky variety, bred by Elena Petrovna Shanina (Yekaterinburg). Each tuber looks like a flat pink pear. By the way, this is one of the few varieties that is almost not affected by the Colorado potato beetle.

In the fall, I will share with the readers of the magazine the result of further adaptation in our area of the descendants of the southern and Ural varieties.