Whenever you see the price of potatoes, the thought comes that it is time to start planting it yourself. There are many ways to plant potatoes in a personal plot. There are all kinds of secrets of gardeners that help to collect a generous harvest, and the best of them are collected in this article.
General rules for planting potatoes:- Before planting potatoes, the ground should be freshly plowed, not dry;
- seed potatoes are put down into the hole sprouts;
- for sprouts to appear on potatoes, it must be laid out in the sun for germination;
- to protect against parasites and worms, wood ash or bean grain is added to the potato hole.
How to plant potatoes manually
After you have plowed the field with a cultivator and cut the soil, getting rid of large lumps, you can start marking the site. To do this, take the wooden stakes and stick them opposite each other, pull the rope between them to get a straight line - this will be your even row for planting potatoes. In this way, delimit the entire plot.
Along the resulting lines, make furrows with a hoe or dig a hole with a shovel: their depth should be 15-20 cm. Put ash or grain of beans, then seed potatoes, and plant the next tuber at a distance of 35-50 cm or one human step.
Fill the potatoes with soil so that a tubercle forms. After planting, you can also sprinkle the earth with wood ash. This will serve as fertilizer and protection against bugs and worms. Also, between the rows of potatoes you can plant beans, calendula flowers, garlic - parasites do not like the smell of these plants, and such neighbors will not interfere with young potatoes.
How to plant potatoes with a walk-behind tractor
Potato is the main nutritious product in Russia and surrounding countries; it often replaces bread. Thousands of tons of this root crop are sold per year to our compatriots. If your plot of land is large enough, then you can not only provide your whole family with food for the whole year, but also grow potatoes for sale, but this requires additional labor or a walk-behind tractor.
Planting potatoes with a motoblock is considered by gardeners to be a more efficient method, requiring much less effort, but more productive: a cultivator makes several furrows at a distance of 100 cm from each other and seed potatoes are then thrown into them. Usually the sower goes along the furrow and puts seeds in front of the foot, then one more step is taken and the tuber is put back. Thus, the distance between the seedlings is 30-50 cm. Next, the walk-behind tractor passes next to the sowed furrow in order to fill it up and make a new one.
How to grow potatoes by unconventional methods
There is a long-forgotten method of
planting root crops, which was undeservedly forgotten - this is sowing under straw. To do this, you do not need any adaptations or tricky actions, just potatoes are laid out on the site and covered with straw from above. The layer should be at least 15 cm. In the fall, remove the straw, and you will see a finished crop, which can far exceed the results of the usual planting of potatoes. They also claim that parasites bypass this crop.
Also, this method is suitable for those whose garden is not protected, and thieves take the crop. Before planting potatoes, try to collect enough straw and cover at least a small area of the estate with it. Be sure that passers-by voyagers pass this place, which will save your harvest.