Gangly Potato Plants

chou-chou

We planted some seed potatoes in IKEA bags and they've grown really well but are very gangly - not at all like the nice neat potato plants I've seen everywhere else. Do you think they'll still crop OK?

Belease

Stupid question, so I apologise - you are earthing them up, aren't you?

What kind of soil did you use? Maybe you need to give them a bit of a feed with tomato fertiliser.

surfsister

are they getting enought light or are they growing up to the light? What are they planted in eg compost? Are they in a greenhose or outside?

chou-chou

We originally planted them in a couple of inches of compost in the bootom of the IKEA blue bags (which we've made lightproof) and then covered them over with more compost as the shoots appeared above the top (instructions from this forum - cheers!).

The compost is now only a couple of inches from the top so we stopped covering them at that point (a month or so ago) and they've just kept on growing!

Did we miss a step in the process maybe???

point3

Ours seem to have shot up over the past fortnight with the rain that we've been having, too.

Make sure that you're not using a Nitrogen rich feed which will cause the green foliage to shoot up at the expense of the tubers (which will be small) and that the plants are not overcrowded - it's normally recommended that there's a minimum spacing of 8 inches between seed potatoes and preferably more.

If the bags are in a shaded place, then try and move them to a sunnier spot. Hopefully they'll be fine. Ours have started flowering, so not long now to see how they've fared...lol.

valk_scot

And the variety is??? Different varieties can grow to anything between 12 inches high to 5 feet.

ellie14

Mine are doing the same thing,the brand is Express ,ones on the allotment are ok apart from some that got poisoned with contaminated fertilizer aka manure delivered fom the stables a lot od us have had problems.