Chitting Potatoes Experiment

I did a small experiment with my potatoes this year as I wanted to know more about chitting. I left several potatoes in an egg tray in the kitchen and as expected they put out several shoots each after a couple of weeks. Generally I find 1 cm (half inch) shoots to be the easiest to handle:

On half of them I removed all the shoots except one, and put those in one half of my “raised bed” (the soil was apparently very loose when I prepared the bed and later it sunk under its own weight. Guess I have to throw in more compost to justify the name ). In the other half of the bed I put the rest of the chitted potatoes, which had several shoots each:

It turns out that the difference is not that big. Sure the ones with several shoots immediately puts up several stems (lower half of the picture), but the other half with only shoot is not limited to having only one stem. So both kinds are growing at the same speed and are equally robust:

(Notice my experiment with a soaker hose; it’s not working that well in my particular set up )

These are the ones that had single shoots:

And these had several shoots before planting:

As time goes by it’s getting even more difficult to distinguish between the two. It will be interesting to see the difference in yield when time comes to harvest.