How often should seed potatoes be renewed so that they do not “degenerate”?

1

If you plant the same seed potatoes every year, the harvest, in turn, will also be meager. Seed potatoes need to be changed every 4 years. There are signs that clearly indicate that seed potatoes have “degenerated” and need to be updated.

Details

• The first sign is poor yield, every year the potatoes become smaller and the tubers in the “nests” become smaller.
• The second sign is more and more root crops with signs of diseases.
• The third sign is that there are fewer and fewer eyes on the tubers. Accumulated diseases and viruses often block their development, and they appear only from the apical shoots.

If such signs have been noticed, then the potato seed stock needs to be changed.

How to modernize a variety free of charge

You need to select healthy large potatoes and keep them in a separate place until spring. And when sprouts appear, you need to cut the top by a third.

The tops are laid out on sawdust, moistened and allowed to grow roots.

You can plant such potatoes in a plot where potatoes have already grown for 2-3 years.

The harvest from these plants will then serve as a seed fund for planting next year.

The second way to renew the seed fund is to regenerate plants from the tops of young shoots.

When the bush rises 15-20 centimeters, the top is cut, rooted and the harvest from these cuttings is used for further propagation.

To prevent the variety from degenerating for a long time, you can collect tubers for seeds during the flowering of the crop, and not during the harvest.

The tubers are dug up in the summer, the root crops are collected and stored in the cellar.