Potato seeds: how to grow at home, planting and care with video

The yield of such a crop as potatoes decreases over time, and the quality of the vegetable becomes not the best due to the impoverishment of the soil. Therefore, the same seed potatoes used for planting lose their taste without renewal. To achieve a high return on a vegetable, it is necessary to change the planting material, observing the rules of crop rotation and agricultural technology.

How to grow potatoes from seeds?

Growing from seeds helps to get elite potatoes that can produce he althy tubers for several years.

Grow potatoes in both seedling and seedless ways.

Planting seeds for seedlings: terms and rules

For seedlings, seeds are placed in containers in spring, in late March or early April. Potato containers are chosen ten centimeters high. They are filled with pre-disinfected soil, composed of humus, garden soil, sand and humus. The distance between potato seeds should be at least five centimeters, and they are planted to a depth of one and a half centimeters.

Before sowing, vegetable seeds need to wake up. To do this, they are heated by placing them in a humid chamber with a temperature of 40 degrees for fifteen to twenty minutes. Then comes the drying of the seed material to a state of flowability. To increase the germination of seeds, they are germinated in a damp cloth or toilet paper.

Seedlings need a warm place with good lighting. You can speed up the germination of seeds by covering the containers with plastic wrap to create a greenhouse effect.

Water the seedlings that have appeared moderately, as the seedlings of the vegetable are prone to decay. In addition, due to the fragility of the sprouts, it is better to spray the ground with a spray bottle.

Growing potatoes in seedlings, do not forget about the proper care of seedlings:

For watering use water at room temperature, trying not to get moisture on the leaves.
Feed potatoes with urea, taking ten grams of fertilizer per ten liters of water.
Regularly loosen the soil after watering.
When plantings are thickened, weak and diseased seedlings are removed.

Potato seedlings should be transplanted into open ground in mid-May. During the procedure, they try not to damage the resulting seedlings, otherwise the seedlings will die.

Seedless sowing of potatoes

Potatoes are planted with seeds and immediately on a prepared bed. They start planting seeds in early or mid-May, when the threat of night frosts is gone, and the soil warms up to plus fourteen degrees. The bed is dug up in advance, then the earth has been cut through. Rows and holes for sowing are planned, having determined a distance of fifty to sixty centimeters.

Instead of holes, furrows four to five centimeters deep are used for sowing potatoes. Before planting, the bed is shed with water, laying the seeds in moist soil. Then a layer of mulch 1 centimeter thick is laid on top.

You can cover the beds with covering material so that the seeds are not affected by low temperatures. After the emergence of seedlings, five to ten days later, they take care of the vegetable plant as usual. Seedlings are thinned out in case of a strong thickening of plantings when they have two true leaves.

Growing potatoes from seeds is successful if the agricultural technique of growing a vegetable plant is followed. Then in the fall they get tubers that will help renew planting material for several years.

Advantages and disadvantages of the procedure

How to get a quality potato product is not always known even to experienced vegetable growers. Some change potato varieties by buying ready-made tubers in a store or market. But this does not always help to update the potatoes in the garden. After all, tubers can rot or carry pathogens. But from seeds at home you can really get elite varieties of potatoes.

The advantage of this method is that the grown potatoes:

will not hurt;
improve its palatability;
will give a high yield in unstable climatic conditions;
will have strong immunity to many vegetable diseases.

Another nuance in favor of growing from seeds. Tubers for planting are expensive, and the cost of elite potato seeds is much lower.

The only drawback of this method of obtaining high-quality tubers is the laboriousness of the growing method. In order for vegetable seedlings to survive, planting and caring for them must be competent.

How to harvest potato seeds?

Potato seeds are purchased in specialized stores. But you can get the seeds yourself, which will give a quality crop of tubers. And you won't have to think about how to update the planting of vegetables in the garden.

The photo shows that potato seeds are in green berries that form on the stems of the plant.Usually these are unripe fruits, and the seeds in them are not yet ready for planting. To make them suitable for sowing, they are harvested when the berries lie down for some time indoors, best of all suspended in gauze bags. They need warmth and light to mature quickly.

When the green fruits become soft, the seeds are squeezed out of the berries. They are washed under running water and laid out to dry. Store seeds until spring in paper bags. The germination of seed material collected from potatoes is low. It should be prepared more than necessary for planting. Seeds retain their qualities for two years.

Potato seedling care

Seed potatoes require certain growing conditions. For active growth, he needs loamy and sandy soils, provided with a sufficient amount of useful elements.

Before planting seedlings, humus in the amount of two hundred grams is introduced into each well. Necessary for potatoes in the ground and superphosphate (ten grams per well), and potassium s alt (five grams). Ingredients are thoroughly mixed with damp earth.

It is advised to place two vegetable seedlings in one hole. After watering, rows of young seedlings are harrowed to rid the potatoes of weeds.

The description of vegetable plant care includes procedures:

furrow irrigation once or twice a season during dry summers when tuberization begins;
fertilizing with wood ash, mineral fertilizers, mullein;
hilling, resulting in the formation of additional underground stems;
loosening row spacing to a depth of five to seven centimeters.

Of the important methods for increasing the yield of potatoes, hilling should be highlighted. It is carried out only when the soil is moist. In dry soil, underground stems, stolons, will not form.The first time seed potatoes are spudded eight to ten centimeters when the stem of the plant reaches a height of twenty centimeters, then before flowering.

When there is a powerful development of the tops of a vegetable and the appearance of weak ovaries, then one cannot do without adding wood ash and phosphorus-potassium fertilizers in liquid form to the aisles. For the procedure, thirty grams of superphosphate and fifteen grams of potassium s alt are dissolved in a bucket of water.

Potatoes grown from seed produce strong tubers. In the first year there will be only a few of them, and in terms of weight they will not please with size. But in the future, these nodules will become the basis for high yields of elite varieties.

Feedback on the method of growing tubers from seeds is only positive. The only difficulty is that it is difficult to prepare the seedlings. How to grow seedlings of potatoes, how to properly transplant them into beds can be seen on the video.

How to protect seedlings from diseases and pests?

Young shoots of potatoes are susceptible to many diseases, among which fungal diseases are common: late blight and ring rot.

Late blight can attack adult plants at the moment when the humidity in the soil and air rises. The leaves begin to be covered with brown spots on top, and white bloom on the bottom. Potato rot affects both stems and tubers. The progression of the disease is indicated by hard spots on the root crops, then they completely rot. To save seed potatoes, to prevent disease, the stems of the vegetable should be highly hilled. And the diseased tops are removed and destroyed before harvesting the tubers. Affected plants are treated with Bordeaux mixture three times over the summer.

Ring rot is recognized by rounded cream-colored spots with glassy areas. If diseased tubers are stored, the entire crop will die.

Among the crop pests, the Colorado potato beetle and its larvae come first. But to protect against the parasite, there are many chemical and folk remedies that must be used several times during the growing season of a vegetable plant.

Harvesting and storage of crops

The potatoes begin to be harvested when the tops dry up. The dug out nodules leave everything, despite their small size. Potatoes must be dried under an awning or in a barn. Drying should take at least three to five days.

It is necessary to keep seed potatoes intact until spring, so they create ideal conditions for them:

Before laying vegetable tubers in the cellar, the room is treated with table s alt (150 grams), slaked lime (two kilograms), copper sulfate (one kilogram) diluted in ten liters of water.The cellar is also ventilated, and then the tubers are placed in boxes made of wooden planks. Potatoes need a temperature of two to four degrees above zero and a humidity of seventy to eighty percent to maintain their qualities.
You can put potatoes on a glazed balcony or loggia. Boxes with tubers are covered from above with a warm blanket or straw.
If there are no conditions for storing root crops, then a refrigerator will do. It is safer to place the tubers on the bottom shelf in a paper bag.

In the apartment, you can save new varieties of vegetables grown from seeds, if you monitor the storage conditions during the winter. It is necessary to constantly inspect the fruits in order to remove damaged and rotten ones in time.

Next year, seed potatoes will produce more tubers, and gradually the yield of the vegetable will grow.