Even if it sounds confusing at first - potatoes are sown. Not with seeds from a bag. No, when sowing potatoes in the garden, seed potatoes are placed in furrows. Seed potatoes are about 3 cm large potatoes, from whose sprouts the potato plant grows.
Get seed potatoes
You can get seed potatoes in the garden center or via garden mail order. By pre-germinating the potatoes about two to four weeks before sowing, you can speed up the growth of the tubers.
The sowing of the early potatoes begins in March. Mid-early and late potatoes are sown from mid-April to the end of May.
Prepare the bed
The bed for the potatoes is already dug up in autumn. In the spring you break up the clods with a cultivator and rake the soil smooth. With the cultivator handle you draw about 10 cm deep furrows with a row spacing of at least 60 cm.
Sow potatoes step by step
- Place the seed potatoes in the furrow at a distance of 30 cm
- the shoots must point upwards
- sprinkle rotted compost over the seed as fertilizer
- Loosely rake furrows with soil
- water carefully so that the soil is not washed away
Don't forget to stack!
Potatoes must be piled up. This not only protects against frost, but also against sunlight and the formation of green spots caused by the toxic solanine.
The first piling up takes place immediately after sowing by raking up soil over the furrow to form a dam with the rake. If the first shoots emerge later, a new layer of earth is heaped over them.
Until the potatoes bloom, repeat the mound every 2 weeks until the mound is about 12 inches high. Especially when the dam is worn down by heavy rain, it has to be rebuilt.
tips and tricks
A foil tunnel (€11.46) protects new potatoes in particular from frost. A positive side effect: the air under the film warms up and drives growth. Inexpensive foil tunnels are available as kits in gardening shops.