We plant potatoes in a special way, or my way is the best! How to properly process virgin soil for planting potatoes? Planting potatoes on virgin soil for the first year.

Planting potatoes in virgin lands is a question that almost everyone who has just acquired plots faces. As you know, potatoes are among the crops that clean the soil well from weeds. That is, after planting potatoes in a certain place for a couple of years, you will get soil quite suitable for planting other vegetables: cucumbers, tomatoes, greens, etc. In addition, potatoes planted in virgin lands, as a rule, give very good yields, since the rested land contains a nutrient elements.

So where to start? It all depends on the area you are going to process and your capabilities.

Methods for planting potatoes in virgin soil

Personal experience

I will talk about my experience of planting potatoes in virgin soil on a small piece of land. Our dacha in the city is well-groomed, and such a problem arose after the old trees were cut down, under which the soil had never been dug. To begin with, I processed this area with a chopper, removing the grass if possible. Then I dug holes at a distance of about half a meter from each other and about fifteen centimeters deep. Since the plot is irregular in shape, a specific landing pattern was not adhered to. I poured a little ash into the bottom of the holes, poured them with water and laid the potatoes with their sprouts up. From above, the pits were covered with humus. After that, the entire area was overlaid with cardboard, while leaving the holes with planted potatoes open. Cardboard, so as not to be blown away by the wind, fixed where with the ground, where with improvised materials.

Despite the fact that the soil was not cultivated, the potatoes sprouted quite amicably. When the potatoes grew up and reached about twenty centimeters, that is, it was time to spud them, I removed the cardboard. All the grass under the cardboard withered and it was not difficult to cook it. Since the plot was small, I did weeding and hilling potatoes several times, usually after rain.

The potato harvest has been amazing. Since I planted early, we started digging the first potatoes at the end of June. Thus, I killed two birds with one stone: I got an early harvest of potatoes and cleared the soil for planting any vegetables next year. The advantage of this method is the fact that the cultivation of the land and the harvest are achieved in one season.

The situation is completely different if you have to process a large area.

Technique is the best assistant

Less time-consuming, of course, is the option using technology. Let me tell you how my husband does it. We have a house in the countryside and there is a lot of empty land around. In one of the plots, we decided to plant potatoes so that there would be enough for the whole winter. In autumn, the plot was plowed with a tractor. The top layer of the earth was turned over and during the winter the weeds and pests that were on the surface froze. In the spring, when the soil had dried up and the land was ready for cultivation, we walked through the site with a harrow. The earth was thus leveled, the remaining weeds went underground. When the landing dates approached, we walked along the site with a hiller.

Potatoes were already planted in the formed rollers by hand. During the season, two or three times, always after the rain, we passed the site with a hiller. The harvest on the virgin lands pleased. For the whole year we provided ourselves with an environmentally friendly, tasty product.

If you do not have the opportunity to use the technique, you can use other methods of processing virgin soil for planting potatoes.

improvised means

One of them is that the site is divided into conditional strips about fifty centimeters wide. Through one lane they are laid with hay, weeds, weeds. Two months later, the shafts move to the remaining free lanes. Vegetation, which was under the rubble without access to light, practically dies. When grass begins to sprout again on these strips, the shafts return again. At this time, on the vacant strips, it is necessary to loosen the ground superficially and sow green manure:, peas, etc. By adjusting the process, this must be done on each of the strips. In winter, you need to sow rye in the area you are working on. And the very next year at the end of spring, having cut the rye and dug up the site, you can start planting potatoes. In this case, the process of preparing the land for planting takes quite a long time.

The earlier the better

In practice, summer residents use another method of processing virgin soil. In early spring, the top layer of turf is removed. Layers are laid in compost heaps with grass down. After a while, you will get a wonderful fertilizer. The area freed from grass is dug up, fertilizers are applied and potatoes are planted.

Will have to work hard

Another way, but it is quite costly and laborious, is to cover the area intended for planting with a black film since autumn. In the spring, the film is removed and the site is dug up manually with a selection of weeds. At the same time, it is important not to miss the deadlines. You need to dig while the earth is saturated with moisture. The dried earth becomes hard and processing is much more complicated. Care for potatoes planted in such a plot will require more thorough care, since weeding will take a lot of time.

Who has no time

There is experience when the land is not cultivated at all. Potatoes fit into small holes made right in the turf. Foliage, hay are thrown from above, and a small layer of earth is thrown for fixation. Between the rows, so that the grass does not grow, a three-centimeter layer of sawdust is poured. In two years they will rot and serve as a good fertilizer for the soil. Potatoes planted under a layer of straw and leaves do not need to be hilled or watered. Under the shelter, a very favorable microclimate is created for the development of beneficial microorganisms, moisture is well kept.

The development of potatoes occurs at the same time as those planted by the traditional method. The only downside to this method is that it will take some effort to dig the potatoes since the soil is still uncultivated and the ground will be hard. This method is suitable for those who do not have enough time to care for plantings. In this case, the principle applies: planted - collected. I came across this method by watching the video. Although today I do not have the problem of developing virgin lands, nevertheless I definitely want to try it as an experiment.

Wireworm fight

When planting potatoes in virgin lands, you may encounter such a malicious pest as, that is, the crop you have grown will be all in holes. Therefore, a reasonable question arises, how to get rid of it.

One way is to add ash or onion peel to the hole when planting potatoes. The wireworm does not like plants such as phacelia and legumes very much. Sowing these plants as green manure will help get rid of the pest. You can arrange and peculiar bait. Some time before planting, cut potatoes are buried at a shallow depth, these places are marked. The wireworms gathered for the bait are periodically destroyed.

Each of the methods described above for processing virgin soil for planting potatoes deserves attention. Choose the most suitable for you and experiment. Good luck and good harvests!

Varietal potatoes I started growing eight years ago, having purchased Nevsky, Lugovskoy, Elizaveta, Vesna and Udacha potatoes in a seed store. Later, I added the variety Pamyat Osipova to them, which, as I was told, was resistant to diseases: late blight, scab, resistant to nematodes. The Nevsky variety, with its good yield, was rejected by me for taste and the rapid formation of solanine in the tubers. The Spring variety also did not suit my taste, besides, in my area it fell ill with late blight.

The varieties Lugovskoy and Luck pleased me, they were tasty, crumbly, especially the last one, and resistant to late blight. In addition, the Luck variety had surprisingly fragrant flowers. During flowering, the field with this potato variety is fragrant with a delicate aroma.

Luck is an early variety, but I harvested its tubers along with the harvest of the mid-ripening variety Lugovskoy, since this variety quite satisfactorily withstood the period until harvest on September 15-17 in a plot with green tops or cut off in rainy weather.

Recently, I have added the Charodey and Naiad varieties to the Udacha and Lugovskoy varieties. They also differ in resistance to late blight and good taste. Realizing that you can’t grow Lucky potatoes in the same area for eight years in a row without renewing the seeds, I started looking for its tubers in gardening stores. To be honest, I was unpleasantly surprised when I saw Lucky tubers in one store, surprisingly similar to Zhukovsky tubers. But experts know that the Udacha variety differs from other varieties in the oval flat shape of the tubers, the Zhukovsky variety, on the contrary, has round tubers. But at the spring exhibition in Eurasia, I finally found planting material of the real Luck variety and planted it in the garden.

Last season, the main plantings of potatoes on a field of two hundred square meters consisted of the Lugovskoy, Charodey and Udacha varieties of long-term reproduction, and on a separate plot with well-fertilized soil with cow dung, I planted Udacha and Charodey tubers purchased at the exhibition for updating varieties. Last summer was characterized by cold, rainy weather in May-June and hot, dry weather in July-August. It turned out that in the first period, insufficiently germinated tubers did not sprout for a long time. Then, in a dry hot time, having formed a small amount (5-6 pieces) of stolons and not forming a good bush, the potato froze in growth. Unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to water the plantings. Therefore, by the beginning of September, compact potato bushes with 5-6 (rarely with a large number) tubers stood on the field, however, large ones due to manure.

But in the twentieth of August, torrential thunderstorms worked a miracle. They made the tops of the potatoes, which had fallen by that time, turn green again, as new young shoots formed, and then new stolons with small nodules. The second flowering of potatoes began, and the potato field presented an unusual picture for this time. The already laid down tops were decorated with green shoots with flowers, which it was even a pity to cut 10-15 days before harvesting, necessary for reliable ripening of the peel. However, it had to be cut off, and all this material was used for composting, since it was not affected by phytophthora.

I want to tell you about another way to grow potatoes. G. A. Kizima once told the listeners of the club "Green Gift -3" at the recreation center "Suzdalsky" about him. This method is good for those who have a lot of virgin, uncultivated lands, but do not have the strength to develop them, for example, for pensioners.

It is known that potatoes are good for the first plantings in virgin lands, because he "makes" the earth. And after it, you can already plant other crops. With this method, potato tubers are planted in virgin grass, but not in growing, but in plucked or weeded grass. On a piece of virgin soil, you put weeds, sod, if any, add a little earth on top, on which you lay out sprouted tubers quite tightly (closer than during normal planting). For example, I use junk material for planting - a trifle wrinkled from time to time with long sprouts, which has a place in a compost heap. From above, the laid out tubers should be covered with grass with a layer of 10-15 cm.

Plantings can then be watered if dry, which will ensure faster shoots. After about a week, potato shoots appear above the withered grass, then they grow very quickly. Due to the dense planting, the tops of the potatoes are tightly closed here. The resulting bed is essentially a compost object, the potatoes are warm and nutritious there, the grass quickly decomposes, providing plantings with abundant organic nutrition. It is only necessary to ensure that the resulting tubers do not remain uncovered in order to avoid their greening. Therefore, it is necessary to cover them with earth or mowed and weeded grass. With this growing method, we get:

Good harvest of clean tubers.
A plot with well-worked, crumbly soil, on which other crops can be easily grown in a crop rotation in the new season.
Beautiful juicy potato tops as a material for further use in other areas of the garden.

I have been using this method on my site for three years now, getting a decent addition of potatoes to the main crop and new plots of good land for a vegetable garden. And last season, I planted sprouted trifles throughout the summer, from June to August. For example, tubers planted in mid-August gave friendly shoots after a week. Of course, such a late planting no longer works for the harvest, but for the development of additional virgin areas. This bed will leave without cleaning under the snow, and next spring, depending on the condition of the soil, it will be possible to either repeat the potato planting or plant other crops on it.

Planting tubers at different times, I calculated, given the time of potato ripening, in September, get a crop of young potatoes in the beds planted in June-July. And so it happened. At the end of September, I dug up already faded or still flowering bushes from these beds, getting very large young tubers. Arriving in the city, I treated my friends to young potatoes, showing them the largest tubers and talking about this method of growing potatoes and developing virgin lands. In addition, my crop of six bags of normal mature potatoes was replenished with another bag of young tubers.

Ludmila Rybkina, gardener, member of the club "Green Gift - 3"

In books on potato farming, virgin soil is often called the best predecessor. And for a gardener practicing tillless farming, virgin lands also seem to be an ideal option. In addition, there are recommendations that potatoes are better than others capable of crushing weeds. Having summed up all this information, the newly minted supporters of natural farming enthusiastically take up planting potatoes in abandoned areas without plowing. But not everything in this matter is clear. I somehow had to plant on virgin soil. If you decide to do this, then you need to be prepared for some "pitfalls":

- Surely there will be a lot of wireworm in the sod. Usually they write that wheatgrass is their favorite place to live. But it is in bulk in the roots of wormwood, quite a lot in the roots of dandelion, the pest lives in the roots of other weeds. Potatoes in this area will be literally all in the hole.

- Virgin soil is not a blank slate, it bears the "print" of those herbs that grew on it. Root secretions, washings from the leaves of the grass that prevailed on the site, will certainly affect potato plants. The reference books indicate that wormwood, quinoa have a bad effect on potatoes if they grow nearby (it is these herbs that most often overgrow abandoned plots that were previously plowed). This also applies to the case when these herbs grew in front of potatoes. This influence can be very strong. In my experience, there was no harvest - few tubers no larger than 3 cm in size.

- If virgin soil is not dug and plowed, then it is very difficult to process the turf. In no-till technology, you need to process the top five-centimeter layer of soil. But! if the virgin soil is many years old, a layer of litter can usually be created no thicker than 3 cm. But most likely in the area where you are thinking of planting, the litter is negligible or completely absent. This happens more often in areas abandoned less than five years ago. In any case, one litter is not enough to sprinkle the tubers. In addition, last year's hard stumps will interfere with work so much that the idea will seem pointless.

- It is ineffective to use the hard long stems of last year's weeds as a mulch that covers the tubers when planting. If the layer of such stems is thick, the sprouts may simply not break through this barrier. And if there are few of them, then they will not be able to play the role of mulch - they will not retain moisture and will not drown out weeds.

- An abundance of weed seeds will provide you with constant problems with weeding.

Maybe all these problems will not affect you, but that's how it was for me. Having drawn conclusions from all of the above, I decided not to try to cultivate the virgin lands with the help of potatoes and went the other way: By eye, I broke the virgin area into strips 50 cm wide and filled them with weeds after one. It turned out to be patches of clean land and rather high, dense ramparts of weeds.

At the beginning of summer, weeds were covered with a solid wall in clean areas. When they rose 10-15 cm, he moved the shafts so that they covered the areas overgrown with fresh weeds. Other areas were clear. There were practically no weeds on them. When these areas were overgrown with greenery, the ramparts were returned to their place. Under weeds, the vast majority of plants died without access to light. In these areas I planted white mustard. I just scattered it over free places and slightly “scratched” the top layer with a rake. According to experts, this plant rids the soil of the wireworm.

When the mustard had grown, but had not yet become coarse, he again moved the shafts, and planted the mustard in the vacant place. Whether the mustard removes the wireworm or not, I can’t say for sure. But the change of growing crops definitely reduces the number of these pests. The following year, he planted green manure in this place for seeds: phacelia, watercress, peas. I didn’t dig anything, only Fokina scratched small furrows with a small flat cutter, and sowed grass in them. And in the autumn he sowed rye. And now, after these events, at the beginning of summer, I cut rye and planted potatoes. By this time, the earth had become more pliable. The strong roots of the weeds are overgrown. Thick trunks of weeds propped up, crumbled.

The harvest has not been bad. The number of wireworm larvae decreased, and "did not exceed the threshold of harmfulness." You should not just plant potatoes on a row bordering virgin land - the tubers are guaranteed to be hit by wireworms.

Of course, the described option for the cultivation of virgin lands is not the only one. Later I used another method. On a plot overgrown with wheatgrass, in the summer I scattered the litter from the chicken coop with a continuous layer of 15 cm and left it like that until spring. And in the spring, the developed area turned green in unison - the seeds of weeds that had accumulated in the litter sprouted. At the end of May, I cut off all this gorgeous greenery with a flat cutter. After the threat of frost had passed, I planted tomato seedlings in this area. He pulled the cord, dug holes in it, planted seedlings in them. On the cut of the edges of the holes, it was clearly visible - there were no couch grass roots, in their place a layer of humus. Keep in mind that the bedding in my coop is 95% chaff, hay, straw, and only 5% litter. Carbonaceous materials are added to the chicken coop little by little every other day. The chickens are actively mixed, flavoring with droppings. If someone decides to cover up a zapyreenny area with clean litter, then the weed, of course, will not be good, but cultivated plants will not grow in this place for 2-3 years. In addition, the released ammonia will kill all living things in the soil, including worms.

Tomatoes this year did not have to be watered - under a thick layer of rotted turf and bedding, the moisture was perfectly preserved.

- An abundance of weed seeds will provide you with constant problems with weeding.

Tomatoes this year did not have to be watered - under a thick layer of rotted turf and bedding, the moisture was perfectly preserved.

Traditional agricultural technology involves spring digging and repeated hilling of seedlings after they appear. This is because the tuberous culture develops well only in loose and soft soil. However, there are ways that do not involve these processes. Gardeners share their experience and video recommendations on how to plant potatoes and not waste time digging the soil, hilling the beds.

Digging and hilling: why many refuse this technology

In recent years, among summer residents and gardeners, the rejection of a shovel and a chopper is gaining popularity. To dig and loosen the earth means to reduce its fertility. The set of the most valuable substances for plants is located in the upper layer of the soil. If it is removed, the roots will not receive the microelements and minerals they need. Therefore, agrotechnology appeared, which eliminates the need to dig the earth.

In the case of potatoes, this method of growing is effective, because the tubers do not grow on the rhizome, but on horizontal stolon shoots. They grow from the base of the stem.

Increasingly popular method of growing potatoes without digging the soil

Potatoes do not have to grow in the ground to form and mature. The main thing is to be in the dark. This feature was taken as a basis by agricultural talents.

Advice. Shoots with growing tubers are covered with opaque organic and artificial materials. It is important that the plant itself remains in bright light. Otherwise, the potatoes will grow tops, not tubers.

Preparing material for planting

The best way to determine the best time to plant a crop in your area is to keep an eye on the bird cherry. Bloomed - prepare the site, although potatoes are often planted earlier. For 1-1.5 months. before that start. Healthy and strong tubers are one of the important factors for the success and efficiency of cultivation.

Follow these steps:

Advice. An alternative to potassium permanganate at the first stage of potato preparation is Fitosporin. Stir a small amount of the mixture into the water. You should have an almost clear liquid. Soak tubers in it for 30 minutes. The further algorithm is the same.

Planting potatoes in virgin beds

Mark the ridge directly on virgin soil, without digging. Pay no attention to weeds. Use only prepared germinated planting material. The optimal size of one tuber is a chicken egg. Potatoes with such dimensions contain the necessary amount of nutrients to form a bush up to 30 cm high with a developed root.

Do not deepen, do not press the tubers. Just lay them out in the garden:

make 2 rows at a distance of about 50 cm from each other;
each of the rows should be no closer than 20 cm from the edge of the bed;
runway length - any;

Planting potatoes on a virgin bed

put 2-3 potatoes at one nest point so that the bushes grow the number of stems necessary for high yields;
distance between nests - 25 cm.

Attention! Too large tubers are not suitable for planting. They give a good growth of green mass to the detriment of the root system. Such specimens should be divided by a longitudinal cut. Moreover, the number of sprouts on each should be the same as possible. Cut tubers must be dried for a couple of days. Before planting, the places of cuts should be sprinkled with ash so as not to let the fungus inside.

Protection and care of potatoes in virgin beds

An airtight material will do as a blackout cover, but not any. It must be dry. Immediately after planting, you can use hay, dry foliage, the top dried layer of compost. In extreme cases, torn and crumpled pieces of wrapping paper or newspapers (black and white printing) will do.

Attention! Straw must not be used. It attracts rodents.

There is no need to cover the ground between the rows. But the material itself will need protection from the wind. To do this, additionally cover the bed with lutrasil or burlap, you can use the old one. It is important that the soil under the material breathes, otherwise the landing will begin to rot. For this reason, polyethylene should not be used.

From mid-May, burlap can be removed - there should be no return frosts. Now the bed is covered with any organic waste, which usually becomes the basis for a compost heap. They are carefully laid out on a dry layer so as not to overwhelm the potato seedlings. The compost layer needs regular updating. Forgetting about the garden will not work: you will have to repeat the procedure all summer.

Cover the beds with mulch

In fact, this is hilling, only without piling on the ground. During the growing season, the compost in the garden will rot and settle. Make sure that the tubers are not exposed. Otherwise, get a serving of corned beef instead of potatoes.

With this method of planting, weeds will not break through the compost layer. The bed can not be fertilized and not watered. Organic waste will do it for you. For easy loosening of the top layer of soil between rows, a flat cutter can be used. Potatoes planted without digging are highly productive and do not require complex work.