What Conditions Does Potato Prefer

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

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Everyone wants tasty potatoes. Part 2

1. Flood-free area even in heavy rain. On swampy soils, the roots have a lack of oxygen, which leads to metabolic disorders in plants. Ripening of tubers is delayed, and with high humidity and "suffocation" of tubers, as a result of which they rot. Potatoes spoil right at the root, and even if they manage to harvest some kind of crop, they will not be stored.

2. Full illumination. Probably no plant reacts to light conditions as strongly as potatoes. And many gardeners are completely wrong when they try to allocate the most shaded areas under the potatoes, completely confident that the tubers will grow anyway. They will grow, but which ones?

With light shading, the yield of potatoes drops by half. It is worth shading a little more - three times, with moderate shading - four times. In other words, potatoes cannot grow in the shade at all. Insufficient illumination leads to stretching of plants, lack of flowering and the formation of small tubers.

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3. Soil fertility is of great importance. Insufficiently fertile soil will never provide you with a good harvest of tasty tubers. However, even on poor soils, in no case should fresh manure be introduced under the potatoes, because the quality of the grown tubers deteriorates greatly: they become watery, tasteless. From fresh manure, potato tops are more strongly affected by fungal diseases, especially late blight, and tubers by scab. It is better to add organic residues and rotted manure under the potatoes.

4. Looseness of the soil. This factor is of enormous importance for potatoes. The roots of the potato are very tender, they absolutely cannot penetrate into the lumps of soil. The soil should be dug up from autumn to 25-30 cm. During the growing season, regular loosening is required after rains and watering. The best thing is to mulch the soil under the potato bushes. Then the laborious operation of breaking up the soil crust will become unnecessary.

Even monks in the 19th century grew the so-called "straw potatoes" in Russia. Instead of hilling the potatoes, they covered them with a thick (about 20-30 cm) layer of straw. And the potatoes worked out wonderfully well. Of course, it is already problematic for us to get such an amount of straw. Therefore, I still sprinkle the potatoes, although the experiment with "straw potatoes" was carried out in a limited area and very successfully.

However, due to the impossibility of obtaining such an amount of straw, I still huddle the potatoes, but then mulch, though not with straw, but with what is at hand: sawdust and grass cut along the sides of the site and in the lowlands. Quite often, weeded grass is also used. True, as you understand, you can only use the grass that does not germinate for this purpose.

5. Periodic watering. Watering should be rare, but abundant, in order to wet the soil layer to a depth of 40-50 cm. In different periods of growth and development, potatoes need water differently. Least of all moisture is needed at the time of the dying off of the tops. But at the time of budding and flowering, the lack of moisture will immediately affect the size of the tubers and the harvest as a whole.

6. The most favorable temperature for potatoes 18 … 20 ° C. A decrease in heat slows down the growth of plants, making them susceptible to various diseases. When the temperature drops to 10 … 12 ° C, tuberization weakens. Potato tops are also sensitive to low temperatures. At a temperature of 1 … 1.5 ° C, the plants turn black and die. To protect against low temperatures, the potatoes are spud and covered with a covering material. An increase in temperature above 25 ° C is also unfavorable for potatoes and leads to a slowdown in its growth. And if at a temperature of 25 ° C the growth of tubers only slows down, then at a temperature of 30 ° C and higher it stops completely.

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