I think the takeaway is that I obviously want to chit my potatoes.
Sometimes, you do your best to set up an experiment, but Nature intervenes in ways that you didn’t anticipate. This isn’t my first failed garden experiment. But it’s a pretty spectacular fail, in a way that ends up being informative.
This year, I thought I was being so clever in setting up a careful test of chitted (pre-sprouted) versus non-chitted potatoes. To eliminate any influence of soil, nutrients, and sunlight on potato yield, I inter-planted alternate rows of chitted and non-chitted potatoes. This was done over a month ago, on St. Patrick’s day, using surveyor’s flags to mark the rows of chitted potatoes.
But the effect of that isn’t to create a level playing field. Instead, because the chitted spuds are up so much sooner, the non-chitted spuds are going to grow in the shadow of their chitted brothers.
It’s as if I grew the chitted potatoes in a nice, clean field, with no competition for sun, water, and nutrients. And grew the non-chitted potatotes in a field full of big weeds. It’s just not a fair test of the effect of chitting per se.
Worse, this is a one-way test. The only interesting result in this relatively low-(statistical)-powered experiment would be if the non-chitted potatoes have a lower yield. But if that occurs, I won’t be able to say whether that was due to chitting, or whether it was due to planting them right next to bigger, more advanced competitors. Competitors that are seeking the exact same nutrients out of the soil that they are.
So this was, in hindsight, a best-laid plan that has gone astray. I should have had separate plots of chitted and non-chitted potatoes. Given that almost all the hard effort was going to be in the harvest — because I was going to be careful and harvest each potato plant separately — I’m calling it quits on this experiment. It’s not worth the effort to finish it.
I guess the good news is that I really didn’t expect the chitted potatoes to get that much of a head start on the non-chitted potatoes. It didn’t even occur to me that they’d be so much further along that it would screw up my experiment. But now that I’ve seen it, I think the takeaway is that I obviously want to chit my potatoes. At least here in Virginia, where the heat of summer is what shuts down potato production for the year.
So maybe I learned what I needed to learn, anyway. I can’t say that chitting potatoes leads to a higher yield. But if mid-summer heat is the enemy, then chitting is obviously an ally.
And, realistically, that’s all I needed to know.
