Are You Chitting Me? Preparing Seed Potatoes For Planting

Pre Sprouting Potatoes Is Called Chitting or Greening

I love potatoes, especially fingerlings. The organic ones are pretty spendy though, so I grow my own when I can.

Since potatoes don’t have seeds, growing them is a different process than is used for other vegetables.

Pre-sprouting, or chitting, is the process of beginning the potatoes’ growth before actually planting them in the soil. It is not necessary but will get your potatoes growing earlier in the garden, and will give you higher yields.

Who doesn’t want a jump on the season?

Potatoes are a cool weather crop and should be planted about one month before your last frost date. In my Zone 8, the last frost is Mar 15. This is important because the productivity of potatoes falls in weather above 90 degrees and anything hotter than that may even kill the plants.

I plan on starting my seed potatoes by February 1st so they can be out in the garden by March 15th. If all goes well, the potato harvest begins in late August.

Chitting is best done 6 weeks in advance. If the potatoes sprout earlier than that you can remove any sprout larger than 2″. This way, the sprout will not grow back but the potato will be able to focus its entire stored energy into growing or producing new sprouts just in time for planting.

Sprouts: How Many Is too Many?

A single sprout is needed for a new plant to form, but potatoes are genetically wired to produce more sprouts to boost their survival rate. It is a great Plan B having a couple of spare eyes or more just in case the main sprout gets chewed on or freezes off.

You can pre-sprout and plant whole seed potatoes (2 inches and under) or cut them into pieces with multiple eyes. By cutting them into multiple pieces, you’ll get fewer but bigger potatoes than you would if you planted them whole.

However, if you do plant them whole, sprout only egg-sized potatoes with at most three eyes on each (as someone’s potato-loving Grandma’s once aptly put it, “One [eye] for shoots, one for roots, and one to thank God.“)

As a rule of thumb, 4 to-5 eyes on your seed potato will yield more crops, but they will be small potatoes. One or 2 eyes per piece will yield less crop, but larger potatoes.

Under normal conditions, one eye will produce three tubers: one large, one medium-sized, and one egg-sized. It is best to keep the egg-sized potatoes from a harvest for a new crop next year.

If you do cut the sprouted potatoes in pieces, give them a day or two to callus over and cure. Some old timers dip them in wood ash to help the process. This curing is important if you are going to plant in damp, cold soil to prevent rot and fungus growth.

Timing is Critical

If you are using newly dug potatoes from your own garden, you need to break their dormancy and awaken them.

According to the downloadable .pdf at Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply, you can break dormancy and induce early sprouting by putting your seed potatoes with apples, bananas or onions in a paper bag. The ethylene gas given off will initiate sprouting.

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Keep in mind that the dormancy period varies from one variety of potato to another. It is best to choose the variety that best fits your garden and local climate, or else you’ll have to put up with a lot of hit-and-miss before finding the cultivar that thrives in your area.

What’s more, it is not temperature or time that usually breaks a tuber’s dormancy, but moisture. That’s why many of us might have found sprouted spuds even when abandoned for weeks in a household refrigerator.

The Chitting Process Is Fairly Easy:

Spread out your seed potatoes in an open top shallow box or egg carton with the seed end pointing up. The seed end has little dimples in the tuber there the sprouts will emerge and the strongest sprouts will form.

Keep them in a warm, bright spot with constant temperature like the kitchen counter for 2 to 3 weeks or until sturdy green shoots appear.

If you use moderate light, and keep them at temperatures in the 60-70 degree range, you can speed up the process a bit. This way, the sprouts will grow stocky, sturdy and dark green. However, don’t keep the tubers in direct sunlight. The more light there is in the process, the shorter, greener and tougher the sprouts will be.

This is the only time when it’s alright for potatoes to turn green; the color usually indicates the presence of an inedible and harmful nerve toxin called solanine. In large quantities, the toxin might cause nausea, stomach pain and discomfort, diarrhea, headaches, eczema, pain in the joints, and cardiac dysrhythmia.

You can plant as soon as the chits are ½ in. – 1 in. long. If you have to postpone planting because of weather or some other reason, move them to a cooler spot, to slow down their growth.

Dig a shallow trench and cover them with 3 inches of soil. As they grow you will be hilling more soil around the plant.

I had great success growing potatoes in a laundry basket on my deck over the last several years and I will probably try that process again because it is so fun. I also plan on growing my potatoes vertically to save space. Check out my Pinterest Board – Potatoes | Goodness Unearthed – for all things potato related.

Chitting Store Bought Potatoes: Yes or No?

This has been a heated debate for as long as spuds and modern grocery stores have been around. Growing potatoes from store-bought potatoes has its upsides and downsides.

The main advantage is that simply growing grocery store potatoes is a lot cheaper than buying certified seed potatoes from a local nursery. What’s more, store bought potatoes are readily available, there are no shipping fees, and they’re often found lying already fully sprouted in that cool, dark corner of your pantry.

So, why not giving it a shot?

You could but at your own risk.

I’m going to side with old school potato growers on that one. There are multiple reasons for steering clear of growing store-bought potatoes but the key takeaway is disease prevention. Potatoes, unfortunately, carry lots of bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases. And the last thing a gardener would want is to import a nasty virus into his or her garden’s soil and render that lot unusable for years.

Yes, the soil will need THREE whole years to recover from a potato disease and likely lots of amendments for a full recovery. Potato blight and scab are two of the most devastating fungal diseases a potato crop might have to face.

While symptoms of the two conditions might be easily spotted on a diseased potato, they are not always obvious. Plus, blight spreads through spores, which are carried by wind, water, insects, critters… you name it. So, if your garden has a blight issue, your neighbor might soon have one too.

These two potato diseases are so contagious that you should think twice even before throwing those potato peels into the compost pile. Also, since fungal infections build up in the soil over the years, it is best to not plant anything from the potato family on the infected allotment for three years.

But one might argue that certified seed potatoes are crazy expensive. That’s true but only in the short run. If you plan on feeding your family from that first batch of certified (heirloom) potatoes for years, that’s the only big investment you’ll need to make as potatoes clone themselves into new potatoes and you’ll have disease-free tubers for as many years as you grow them.

What’s more, certified seed potatoes tend to be less expensive the more you buy. Plus, you might find some rare varieties at a nursery that you cannot possibly find in your local grocery store, like these quirky blue potatoes.

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So, growing store-bought potatoes is an absolute no? Not quite. Store bought potatoes can be safely grown in an enclosed container so that you don’t risk spreading any disease across the entire garden soil.

There are multiple ways of growing potatoes in containers, I’ll name just a handful: the tower method, the used tire method, the grow bag method, the potato box method, and there’s even a laundry basket method I covered extensively here.

If you do opt for a store-bought variety to chit, at least pick an organic variety as they are less likely to be sprayed with toxic sprout-delaying agents. Yes, many store-bought potatoes are sprayed so they can last longer on the shelves.

Just imagine what an anti-sprouting agent, which works by hampering natural cell division, can do to your body in the long run.

Wrapping Up

Chitting or pre-sprouting potatoes can give you at least a two-week head start when growing potatoes. This way, you’ll have spuds absolutely ready for planting before the last frost date in your area.

Chitting is not a resource-intensive process and has a fairly high rate of success if you manage to give the little guys the right temperature and light conditions.

Growing potatoes from store-bought varieties has its risks, including surprise diseases and toxic cocktails that prevent the potatoes’ natural sprouting process. But it is the go-to-method of many home growers due to its hard-to-beat convenience. I do believe that it is a safe method only when growing potatoes in containers.

Have you had success pre sprouting your potatoes? What is your favorite potato variety to grow in your home garden?

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