Growing potatoes under the mulch - my reviews and personal experience
Potatoes under mulch - a very good way
Authors often proudly quote the "technical parameters" of their potato harvests. Some figures are so amazing that when you try to understand them, you sometimes lose touch with reality.
If so much of our second bread is harvested in an ordinary suburban area, then is there any other planting on it, except potatoes? Although, of course, in any case it is interesting to read these reports, because we all need to strive for intensive farming. Well, I will share my achievements too.
My potato plantation was more than modest in size -120 × 120 cm. I prepared my potato mini-ridge behind the grid, which encloses the main plot of my garden, that is, the potato grew, as they say, on the backs. The soil there is unimportant - loamy. I didn’t dig it up before landing, only the top layer was loosened with a chopper to a depth of 6-7 cm.
Then laid out on the mini-garden 16 selective tubers (with a distance between them in 30 cm) and blanched everything with semi-decayed compost from maple and acacia litter. The thickness of this cover is 10-12 cm. I must say right away that such mulch was harvested from late autumn, and during the winter and early spring it turned into a good fertilizer with a uniform composition.
When there were shoots, I covered them with another mulch - a five-centimeter layer of straw. In the future, for mulching potatoes used beveled weeded grass. At the time of harvesting, the total layer of mulch reached 20-22 cm.
Of course, I also followed the soil moisture. Once during the entire growing season, he fed plantings with infusion of chicken manure and twice with infusion of wood ash. I must say that all this troublesome combined shelter came in very handy, because in the summer we had incredible heat at 35-38 °.
Melon crops and tomatoes, covered with "single-compound" mulch, just caked, and potatoes withstood this test. Her crop was a meter high, dark green and thick.
See also: The scheme of planting potatoes under the straw - reviews and conclusions
Although, I confess, at first I was tormented by doubt that the topsome were good, but as if in the roots it was not empty. Especially my anxiety intensified after for the sake of a control check, I dug up one bush in July, and under it were nodules the size of a gulkin nose. Did it really go wrong? I visited my potato almost every day. And every day he racked his brains.
But at the beginning of August a miracle happened - the started tubers began to gain weight by leaps and bounds! At the end of September, when the tops began to turn yellow, I started harvesting. I will scoop up the mulch under the bush and rejoice - this is the harvest! The potato is large, little white, clean! There are 26 pieces in the nest - and this is from one tuber! That would be to show people, but nobody around. Okay, it's nice anyway.
Under other bushes, the crop was slightly lower, but still worthy: in total, I collected 120 kg from a mini-bed 120 × 18 cm. I think this is a good result, given the more than modest size of the landing area. Moreover, 'Nikolai Ivanovich Kurdyumov, author of The Smart Garden, 12-13 kg of potatoes per 1 sq. Km. m considers high end result. And I have more!
See also: Cultivation of early potatoes under the straw - my feedback on the method
In this regard, I will return to the beginning. In one of the magazines I read the report of the landowner, which is from 11 square meters. m collected 33 kg of potatoes. At the same time, he emphasized that he planted in the best agronomic terms, added organic matter, watered, mulched and summed up: “On a hectare, I would have reached a yield of 330 c.” I don’t think so: a large landing area is not a guarantee of success - rather, on the contrary. Try on the same hectare to give all the best in planting care, as you do on your six hundredths - you will faint! But I know for sure that you can get a record crop on a 120 × 120 cm plot that will provide your needs.
By the way, all the tubers that I received on the mini-bed, I left on the seeds and deposited separately. In the new season, I will sprout them and plant them in the third decade of July. And the potatoes will grow in coolness (because the main heat will already subside), which is one of the preventive measures of degeneration of varieties.
And the most pleasant thing in growing potatoes under the mulch is that you do not need to dig it out later, wielding a shovel: you pulled the bush on yourself - and that's all. True, if the harvest is rich, then these bushes will also have to be turned over with difficulty ...
© Author: Dmitry Kurochka Lugansk region
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- Preservation of the yield of the potato variety you like - so that it does not degenerate
- Potato cultivation in the Kursk region - planting and care
- Potato growing in the Orenburg region
- Planting potatoes under the straw - my responses (Nizhny Novgorod region)
- Is it possible to grow Egyptian potatoes
- How to calculate the timing of planting, hilling and harvesting potatoes?
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