Do I have sufficient statistical power to test the effect of potato chitting, in my back-yard garden? Or is it laughable to think I might be able to learn anything whatsoever about the effect of chitting, from a single small-scale potato planting?
The upshot is in red below. Chitting has to make quite a bit of difference, in order for it to show up in this small sample. Continue reading Post G24-002, Addendum: Chitstistix, a power test.
Above you see the start of some ginger and turmeric plants. These are just a few ounces of off-the-shelf organic ginger and turmeric roots, from the grocery store, cut/broken into pieces, soaked for a bit, pressed into some damp potting mix, covered with more potting mix, then left on a 20-watt seed starting heat mat to sprout.
I ought to start seeing green sprouts emerge in a week or two.
I admit, these were an impulse item. I was at the grocery store, getting some potatoes (for chitting) and sweet potatoes (to get going, for slips for planting), and I noticed the ginger root. I’ve heard that it can be grown in my area (hardiness zone 7). So I picked some up. And if I’m doing ginger, I might as well do turmeric, as they are close relatives and have similar growing requirements.
My advice: Before you start these plants, start with a little math. My growing season is maybe 6 months long. (The Old Farmer’s Almanac lists my growing season as 186 days (reference). Most sources say that ginger requires a 10-month growing season. So, one way or the other, absent a greenhouse, these are going to be houseplants for about four months. One way or the other. Before I can plant them out in the garden.
I haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to manage that. But rumor has it that these will sprout in their own good time, so it’ll be a matter of some weeks before I’ll need to start dealing with that. If they sprout at all.
I mean, how hard can it be, right? Plus, all that delicious turmeric ale.
Finishing off my root/tuber/rhizome starts are my sweet potatoes.
I have sung the praises of the lowly sweet potato elsewhere (Post G23-065). It’s food that can look after itself. Once you get them started, you prune them to keep them from taking over. And dig up some food at the end of the season.
The only hard part is coaxing a handful of sweet potatoes to sprout, so that you can plant the sprouts. And even that isn’t hard, it just seems to take forever. Plop a few sweet potatoes into a box full of potting soil, keep it warm and moist, and wait. And wait. And wait.
So I start my sweet potatoes now — around Groundhog Day. Which seems ridiculous, given that they really don’t want to go out into the garden before May 1 or so, at the earliest. But it really does seem to take them months, every year, to begin producing slips. So in they go.
Aside from remembering to water them every once in a while, this is zero effort. You just have to remember to do it early enough, every year.
This post is a classic example of why nobody consults this blog for gardening advice.
If you are a back-yard gardener, and are considering whether or not to grow potatoes, you want advice. Directions. You want somebody to say do this, do that. Follow this approach and success is guaranteed.
But much internet-based advice for the home gardener is folklore. Frequently repeated, never tested. Certainly not tested by the folks who repeat it. Such folklore is sometimes helpful, sometimes merely harmless, and sometimes dead wrong.
What I’m supposed to say in this post is something like “it’s time to chit potatoes now, before you plant them”. That is, get them to break dormancy and sprout first, then plant the sprouted potatoes. And then I’m supposed to explain how I go about doing that.
As if I were somehow privy to the innermost secrets of potato-chitting.
What I’m actually going to tell you is this:
This year, I’m going to set up a little experiment to test the impact that chitting has, for my potatoes, here in Northern Virginia Zone 7.
But in this post, I’ll first explain how I go about growing potatoes in my back-yard garden. I ignore almost all the rules on proper potato etiquette. So it’s not clear what my advice is worth, anyway. But unlike your average garden blogger, I’m up-front about that.
Free advice is worth what you pay for it.
Even though potatoes are cheap, I grow them for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s easy and effective.
Deer won’t eat them. Neither, so far, will the bugs. In a good year, they produce a lot of calories per square foot. Within reason, you can harvest them whenever you’re ready. They keep well. They taste better than grocery-store potatoes. And around here, they’re done by mid-summer, and you can double-crop with beans or some other short-season crop. Last year, I planted late-season corn after my potatoes were done.
I start by buying organic potatoes from the grocery store. Organic, to avoid buying potatoes sprayed with a potent sprouting inhibitor (Post G22-004). From the grocery store, because I’m cheap, and it’s convenient, and so far, it works just fine.
There are some downsides to this. You have no clue what your varieties are. This year, mine are “red” and “gold”, per the picture above. If you live in the South, don’t bother with russets, as they take too long to mature for this climate (Post #G23-035). Other than knowing to avoid those, you have no idea if your grocery-store potatoes are early-season, mid-season, or main-season potatoes. (In the South, you would like to avoid long-season (main-season) potatoes, because potatoes don’t like Southern summer heat.) If you get a particularly good or bad crop, you can’t replicate the variety. And so on. Not to mention, no guarantee they are virus-free.
OTOH, given that I can typically get potatoes at the grocery store for around 80 cents a pound, as the price of seed potatoes, with shipping, approaches $10/pound, if you do this “right”, you have to have a pretty good yield, just to get your money back. It’s just a lot less stress to pick up a bag or two at the grocery store, than to obsess over which variety of ludicrously expensive seed potatoes to order.
I chit them near a window, at room temperature, starting on or about Groundhog Day. Just set them out, on a tray, and watch for sprouts to start. It’s less than totally decorative, but it’s close to no effort. This in USDA Zone 7, so adjust accordingly for your climate. This is roughly 10 weeks before the expected spring last frost date in this area.
See last section for discussion of chitting.
I plant on St. Patrick’s day, after cutting them into chunks the day before. St. Patrick’s, because I can remember the date. And because that’s about four weeks before our expected last frost date in the spring. Planted in the cold of March 17, it takes about a month for the shoots to emerge from the ground, so that, ideally, you’ll see those potato shoots just after danger of frost has passed.
Dig a little trench 4″ or so deep, chuck in the potatoes, cover them up, toss a little mulch on top. I aim for about a 1′ to 1.5′ spacing in all directions. Conventional wisdom says that if you plant them further apart, you’ll get fewer, larger potatoes. Makes sense, but I can’t say that I’ve tested that. You’re also supposed to “hill” them after they have grown a bit — just mound up a little more dirt onto the potato stems. Apparently the entire point of hilling is merely to keep the sun off the potatotes, so they do not form poisonous solanine (see Post G23-065, on why green potatoes can kill you, but green tomatoes won’t). Anything sufficiently opaque — dirt or mulch — will do.
That long time lag between planting and sprouting is a good reason to chit. If, somehow, your seed potatoes aren’t going to sprout, if you don’t chit, you’ll only find out about it a month or so after you planted them. Eventually — call it six weeks later — it will dawn on you that you aren’t seeing any potato sprouts, and you need to re-plant. Which, in the South, means you’ll end up trying to finish off your potatoes in the heat of summer, which is a bad idea.
I plant them in dirt. I’ve tried no-dig potatoes using straw (worked great, but straw bales are too expensive in my area, Post #1073), and no-dig potatoes using leaf mulch (dismal failure, but hey, the leaf mulch is free in my area, Post G23-041). Separately, for a variety of reasons, I’m not going to grow potatoes in containers. So dirt it is.
Why mess around with no-dig potatoes? Clay soil. Potatoes don’t like the heavy clay soils in my area, so it takes a huge amount of soil amendments (or bringing in topsoil, which I did for my raised beds) to get dirt that potatoes will grow well in. If you have clay soil, and want to try potatoes, do-dig is a lot less effort. In addition, you can use a year of no-dig to convert some lawn to garden bed, if you bury it deeply enough in mulch. Either way, in the right circumstances, no-dig is a way to reduce the total effort involved. (Also, the potatoes come out nice and clean.)
Why did no-dig potatoes in leaf mulch fail miserably, but no-dig potatoes in clean straw were a success? In hindsight, I think that it allowed the potato tubers to get too hot. I have since seen one excellent gardener (Self-Sufficient Me, on YouTube have a near-identical potato failure using no-dig in leaf mulch. Upon reflection, I think that the dark, compacted leaf mulch, in full sun, allows the potato tubers to get too hot, leading to few potatoes set, small potatoes, and knobby potatoes. Potatoes really do not like heat. If I do no-digs again, I’ll keep the soil temperature in mind, and either use deep, light-colored mulch, or set up a shade cloth over them.
Separately, regarding fertilizing potatoes, I dump enough leaves on the garden each year that I don’t have to worry about adequate soil nutrients such as nitrogen. But potatoes, in particular, are supposed to benefit from adequate potassium in the soil. It’s good for their skins. (And, correspondingly, potatoes in the skin are a high-potassium food.) It’s easy enough to test your soil for potassium with one of those $10 soil test kits from the hardware store, and if lacking, to spread minute amounts of potassium chemical fertilizers before you plant a potato bed.
Weed and water them, just like any other plant in the garden.
I pull off the flowers as they form. This, because the internet tells me to do so. This process aligns the potato plant’s chakras or something. I have no clue whether it makes any difference or not. Just FYI, potatoes have pretty white flowers.
I harvest them when the tops die back. Or I want the garden space for something else. Once they start laying lying down and looking straggly, that’s a good sign that they are done for the year, and can be dug up at my convenience.
Note, however, that potatoes do not like heat. In a warm-summer climate like Virginia, those tops are going to die back sometime around mid-July, no matter whether the tubers underground are finished or not. If I could pick my varieties, I’d grow early-season (short-season) potatoes. But given that I grow mine from grocery-store potatoes, … whatever happens, happens.
If I’m lucky, I’ll come in at the low end of the yields posted above. Not sure if it’s the climate, the soil, the gardener, or the lack of care. Just be aware that a lot of the miracle yield claims you’ll see on the internet are complete, total, and intentionally misleading bullshit. When in doubt, check with your local extension service to see what you can reasonably expect in your area.
Why chit? Conventional wisdom says this will lengthen your growing season by perhaps a week or two (reference, University of Utah). I.e., put you a week or two head of the game, compared to planting without chitting. In the South, that’s a good thing, as potatoes don’t like heat, and they are going to die off in the heat of mid-summer, ready or not. Plausibly, you’ll get an extra week of growth before the heat kills off your potatoes, and that should translate into higher yield.
But, as with so much advice for the home gardener, everybody repeats this, and seemingly nobody tests it. There’s surprisingly little hard evidence on the benefits of chitting potatoes, and what evidence there is is mixed (per the Guardian newspaper).
If you search the internet, you’ll see disagreement on almost every aspect of chitting. The only thing I’m sure of is that it’s optional, because commercial growers don’t chit them. But seemingly experienced gardeners disagree on:
As a one-time professional user of vague, observational data, to me, this signals that the benefits of chitting, if any, are probably modest. If chitting had some huge benefit, people would have noticed.
In fact, I’d say there’s a case to be made that “chitting” was invented as a way to control the inevitable sprouting of potatoes in some climates, absent climate-controlled spaces. You’d bring your potatoes out of the root cellar, into the light, to green up the sprouts and control the rate of sprouting, so that they’d still be viable when planting time finally came around.
So this year, I’m going do to a little experiment. I’m taking half of each bag of potatoes, pictured above, and chitting them. And leaving the other half in the fridge for the next six weeks. This, now done, via the classic one-potato, two-potato randomization.
I then weighed the two randomly-assigned samples, and used a coin flip to determine which was to be chitted, and which was to be stored cold for the next six weeks.
I’ll be planting the chitted and un-chitted spuds, in more-or-less similar plots, on St. Patrick’s day this year. I’ll track their progress and, absent catastrophe, will weigh the final yield sometime mid-summer.
I realize there’s a lot of potential for random variation in this, despite my best effort to draw from the same batch of potatoes, randomize, and then plant as nearly identically as possible. I nevertheless think this can be informative. If, at the end of the season, I can barely tell the difference between the chitted and unchitted spuds, then I think that’s a pretty good clue that chitting has a relatively modest impact on yields. At least, in my climate, my garden, with my spuds, this year.
So, the null hypothesis is that chitting makes no difference. I’ll see if I can plausibly reject that. Expect results sometime around the 4th of July.
With this latest round of our retaliation, for their retaliation, against our ships, in response to the war, in a completely different country, that resulted from the terrorist action, that arose from pre-existing treatment, that is the residual of long-standing conflict … I’m just having a hard time keeping the basic details straight.
I guess what finally set me off is that I have no clue who the Houthis are, why they hate us, and so on. And after reading up on it, and honestly trying to grasp what the deal was, all I could think was, it just doesn’t matter. You could basically do the entire Middle East as a Mad Libs, and it would make just as much sense. And, apparently, even serious scholars sometimes despair that US Middle East policy is just one big, long Mad Libs (e.g., reference).
The current situation is unexceptional. It’s just the way the world works.
Source: Vox, 600 Year of War and Peace, by Zack Beauchamp. Note that deaths is on a log scale on this chart, which flattens the peaks quite a bit.
Source: Our World in Data, War and Peace, by Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, Max Roser, Joe Hasell and Bobbie Macdonald
Source: Our World in Data.
Just thought you might want to know. Because nobody ever bothers to tell you when the news is reasonable, normal, and good.
Per CDC, US weekly new hospitalizations with COVID, for the U.S.:
The timing of the wintertime peaks (the black lines above) in COVID is extremely regular. All four of those winter peaks are January 1, plus or minus a week or so.
This is both surprising and unsurprising.
It’s surprising in that the winter peak of COVID is far more regular than the similar winter peak in flu hospitalizations. The peak of winter flu hospitalizations varies quite a bit from year to year.
Source: CDC flu data.
But if you think about it, it’s not all that surprising. Flu often has quite a different season from year to year, based on a new mix of strains being prevalent each year, and based on spread from epicenters of infection. COVID, by contrast, is pretty much the same year after year now, and it’s everywhere.
It’s also unsurprising in that these hospitalizations are almost entirely for the elderly, and hospitalization rates for the elderly, for respiratory infections, peak mid-winter every year. So that’s going to reinforce any tendency for COVID to peak at mid-winter.
That said, Virginia still tracks lab-determined cases, and the Virginia case-count data show the exactly same winter regularity as the U.S. data. This, from the Virginia Department of Health:
The peaks are again January 1 of each year, plus or minus a week or so. So it’s not merely a regularity of hospitalizations for the elderly.
Finally, I was tempted to try to make something out of the other apparently regular peaks on that CDC graph, the ones circled below:
But those are a mish-mosh. The first one is due to a new strain — delta ? – that was then suppressed by vaccines (and replaced by Omicron). The second one is more-or-less mid-summer, and so predates return-to-school for that year. The third peak is in early September. There’s really nothing to link them that I can see.
Wait, haven’t you already read this post? Continue reading Post G24-001: It’s Groundhog Day. Again.
This is a quick followup to post #1921, where I dumped some winter pond maintenance bacteria into one side of my tumbling composter, to see what would happen. The question was whether or not that would keep my composter working in the cold of winter.
Now, one month later, the short answer is, not. There is no detectable difference in the level of (un-decomposed) compost, between the treated and un-treated sides.
The upshot is that the only way I’m going to be able to keep that composter working throughout the winter is to heat it. A little passive-solar-heated shed didn’t do the trick. These cold-loving bacteria didn’t do the trick. And having an electrically-heated outdoor composter is a total non-starter, for me.
At this point, I give up. I just won’t compost kitchen scraps over the winter.
It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know that just ain’t so. — Anonymous.
This post is mostly a set of notes to myself on tire sizing and wheelchair tires. Continue reading Post #1937: A brief note on tire size numbers.
Source: Data are from U.S. DOE, Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-860, Annual Electric Generator Report. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, Annual Electric Power Industry Report. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-923, Power Plant Operations Report and predecessor forms.
When technology produces big leaps in energy efficiency, it’s pretty easy to make meaningful reductions in your carbon footprint. Just buy newer stuff.
But as a long-term observer of this issue, it seems to me that technology-driven gains in energy efficiency are hitting their limits. There are a lot of important areas — cars, fridges, lighting, and even electrical generation itself — where any further reductions in carbon footprint look a lot more difficult.
What I’m trying to say is, looks like technology has already grabbed the low-hanging fruit.
I’m not going to belabor the societal implications of this. For me, this means that once I’m driving an EV and living in a house with an efficient heat pump and LED lights, there are no more easy reductions in my household carbon emissions. Nor are there likely to be, for the foreseeable future. Lifestyle changes, yes. Effortless reductions in emissions, no.
Maybe this is as good as it gets.
Continue reading Post #1936: What if this is as good as it gets?
This year, my fridge will be old enough to vote.
In appliance-years, that means it should be ready for retirement. But it’s not. It still looks pretty good, for its age. Continue reading Post #1935: The new fridge efficiency standards. What to do when progress slows to a crawl.
