The garden yard

POTATOES.

A heavy yield of potatoes may be simply a matter of moisture and frequent tillage. The potato likes Scotland⁠[5] and Nova Scotia because it thrives best in deep, cool, moist soil, finely pulverized and containing much potash. Knowing the conditions under which any crop grows well, is equivalent to growing a big crop, to the careful farmer, so if you want some potatoes, you may as well get the most possible. The average farmer raises 75 bushels to the acre, but it pays to be above the average. You ought to be ashamed to grow less than 200 or 300 bushels even taking 75 as a starting point, for, when you consider that by the exercise of brains and labor, all the way from 600 to 1300 bushels per acre have been produced, you may well decide to prove what you can do. You have a chance to beat the record.

Potatoes should be planted deep and early. If they are planted too near the surface they will ripen before they are fully grown or maybe get sunburned and unfit for eating. Choose your best potatoes for seed, if you plant from your own crop; or buy only the best varieties, if you must buy. But it is well to remember that there is always danger in potato seed raised elsewhere than on your own patch where you can watch conditions. Don’t use a potato for seed if it has a black thread running through it; a roughened or irregular circle on the skin, or a hollow center. Burn all such; else you will have diseased crops and give yourself no end of trouble and expense. Plant the seeds at least four inches deep and plow them in. The surface should be harrowed two or three times before the plants come up, and the crop should have light, surface tillings five to eight other times during the season.

Potatoes are planted in “drills” or continuous furrows, 27 to 42 inches apart, at intervals of 9 to 18 inches, and it requires from 8 to 18 bushels of potatoes to plant an acre. Most farmers plant too sparingly. There has been much book discussion as to the size of seed cuttings, but the most economical size is one weighing about three ounces or the size of a large hen’s egg, with at least one good eye. The potato cutting is food; therefore the larger the cutting the more food, and the more food the better early growth, and the better the early growth the better the yield. Bailey claims that a piece containing too many eyes means too many sprouts contending for that food and each weakening the other in the struggle for its own existence.

For early potatoes, the only ones that can pay in a small plot, remember five different things: (1) good site and an early soil; (2) land prepared either by special plowing the fall before, or by growing late-tilled crops, that the soil may be in good tilth; (3) free use of concentrated, quick-acting fertilizers; (4) early varieties of potatoes; (5) sprouting the sets, so that the short, thick, firm, colored shoots are secured. To secure these, light and a moderate degree of warmth, 40°-50°, is needed. Nothing pays better than sprouting.

No crop needs spraying more. Unless it is frequently sprayed, it is almost certain to be attacked by the potato bug, the flea-beetle and blight, and the yield cut down. Dry Paris green puffed on while the leaves are damp with dew, ends the troubles of the bug, and Bordeaux mixture can be sprayed for blight. No specific has yet been discovered for the flea-beetle, but it does far less damage where Bordeaux mixture is freely used. I have heard of letting the chickens loose on the flea-beetles.

SWEET POTATOES.

The common or Irish potato does badly in the South, except as an early crop, because the climate is too warm, but where the common potato suffers, the sweet potato thrives. It requires a warm, sunny climate, a long season, and warm, loose soil, with plenty of moisture during growing time, and less during ripening. It is very tender and cannot stand frost. It is grown extensively as far north as the sandy lands of New Jersey.

The soil must be rich, loose, and well drained and liberally fertilized with well-rotted manure. Wood ashes will help the growth of the tuber most satisfactorily.

Only one variety of sweet potato, the Spanish, is cut and planted like the common potato. All other varieties are grown from “slips,” or, as they are sometimes called, “draws.” A whole potato is laid on a hot-bed and covered with a couple of inches of loose soil or leaf-mould. Very soon it begins to sprout and when the shoots are from three to five inches high, they are broken off next the tuber, and planted. Their roots have already begun to form and these are the “slips.” The same potato or tuber, will give another set of slips if allowed to remain in the ground. In the extreme south no hot-bed is necessary to start the sprouting.

Another method of obtaining slips is from cuttings from the ends of the vines. Take cuttings from 10 to 12 inches long, from the earliest planted or the most vigorous vines. Having removed all the leaves except those at the very tip, plant the cutting lying down with only an inch or two of the tip showing. The rows should be about three feet apart and the slips in the row 18 inches apart. The average yield is from 200 to 400 bushels per acre.

Sweet potatoes suffer from several fungous diseases which are discussed in New Jersey Experiment Station bulletins on Sweet Potato Culture. Leaf blight may be checked by the use of Bordeaux mixture, but rotation is the cure for tuber crop diseases.