Potato Yield!?!?

[Ger-annie-um]

Gosh....who'd have thought growing spuds could be so scientific, the maths involved with this is truly awe inspiring - me, I just bung them in and hope for the best but I'm definately going to get a couple of different size buckets/tubs next year and experiment with growing 1,2 or 3.

Paulieb.......sending any extra's to the 'Lords Larder' project in Newent, saves wasting them. May grow for ASDA next year............if they pass the Co-op test!!!!

[Paulieb]

Your original said:

120g seed - 1000g yield - 52 potatoes
60g seed - 1000g yield - 42 potatoes
60g seed - (120g cut in half) - 875g yield - 30 potatoes
60g seed - (120g cut in half) - 950g yield - 39 potatoes

If we ignore tuber size and instead go by weight.
If I go into Super Garden Centre and find they are selling 600gm bags of absolute clones of your potatoes in the 2 sizes you gave, 120gm and 60gm.

So I buy 2 bags of 120gm seed potatoes, and 1 bag of 60gm seed potatoes.
I then plant them as you did, two lots whole, one lot halved.

Bed A:
120gm whole seed potatoes.
I get 5 plants yielding 1kg per plant so 5 Kg.

Bed B:
60 gm whole seed potatoes.
I get 10 plants yielding 1Kg per plant so 10Kg.

Bed C:
120gm seed potatoes halved.
I get 10 plants yielding for every pair 1.825Kg so 9.125Kg.

On this basis the single large tuber is the worst performing by quite a wide margin for the gardener.

Your original seemed bias towards pointing out the benefit of a nice large tuber, reasonable if you get a fixed number per unit cost, if the purchase unit is weight then a large tuber is possibly the worst you could select, unless sliced in half.

Didn't mean to be biased towards the larger tuber. Was trying to be impartial.

When buying this years spuds the best places were ryton potato fair and dundry nurseries near cheltenham. Both sold single tubers @20p each which is cheaper than anywhere else that I saw, plus you get to choose the tubers and there is a much larger choice of varieties.

So this got me thinking.......are bigger or smaller tubers better?

From my research I guess the best solution is to buy big seeds and cut them, though apparently there is more chance of the seed rotting. Alternatively, what I didn't test was tubers in an unlimited amount of space (the ground).

[Martin H]

Interesting discussion and experimentation, thanks guys.

My theory is that the main thing is the number of eyes / chits / sprouts, while the number of tubers planted and weight of tubers are very much secondary.

Thus, small tubers tend to only have one shoot and do well because they get room to develop, while big tubers push out lots of shoots that end up overcrowded to the detriment of the yield.

I need to devise some decent experiments to test the hypothesis next year. It's going to stretch my labelling capability as well as my maths, though!

[solway cropper]

I have to say that 50 or so tubers with a combined weight of 1kg means a lot of unusable spuds. If I get 3kg that usually consists of 25-30 tubers...much more useful in the kitchen.

[Feral007]

Well that was interesting reading before breakfast!

Making me glad I cut and bunged the taters in the ground yesterday so I didn't have to wonder if I was doing it right

It is interesting reading it, and I haven't grown many taters yet, a couple of tries, and just happy with what turned up so far - once crop that the crows and magpies dug up, but didn't eat, so a good thing in the garden.

I'm going to try for some early, mid and late taters. There were some sprouting on the kitchen table when we cleared it, so I just planted them. I'm no where near as organised as you lot, but will be taking note of what you say because it makes me sound knowledgeable when I tell my son

[Bill HH]

I opened up my compost dalek today to find hundreds of potato shoots, the peeling we had put in last week had all thrown up a shoot. I wonder how many potatoes it would be possible to grow from just the peelings of one potato?.