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Old April 26, 2011   #12
Tom Wagner
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: 8407 18th Ave West 7-203 Everett, Washington 98204
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Went to the greenhouse to see how my seedlings and transplants were doing....way too cold to grow tomatoes...they are just hanging on....but the potato transplants from TPS are doing fine although not growing much after a couple of weeks. The jewel of the greenhouse was the Azul Toro variety of potato tubers that I potted up over a month ago.....72 little tubers...marble size to golf ball....and these tubers had hundreds of very leafy plants growing up...I made 288 pull plants from 19 little tubers. At this rate ....
15 times 72 = 1080 pull plants on the first pull event.

I should easily get another cycle of pull sprouts as i put the tubers minus the sprouts back in the soil media...the tubers being very turgid and eyes ready to sprout more shoots again soon. I should end up with at least 1500 rooted plantlets to put out in the field once it is warm enough to safely transplant them ....maybe in a couple of weeks. I will need to fertilize heavily when I transplant to encourage lush and rapid growth. My goal is to get a minimum of 2,000 lbs. of Azul Toro.

The tubers had sprouted out from every eye and had an average of 10 or more shoots from all the eyes. The pots were about 4 inches deep with a heavy feeding at the bottom one inch of soil media with blood meal, kelp meal, alfalfa meal, rock phosphate, lime, cottonseed meal, greensand and fish/bone meal. The roots had penetrated the entire pot and were quite vigorous. The leaves were a deep purple green, showing the beneficial effects of the feeding and the natural purple pigments of the blue potato type. The 4" deep pots are in trays of 24 inserts. The three trays together was a mass of two to three inch tall plants....wish I had a picture...very healthy plants.

The Azul Toro is a very shiny blue skin...blue fleshed potato that is a cross of my Negro Y Azul variety crossed to Kern Toro. The tubers were from a June harvest of last year of little tubers in a small shoe box kept at ambient temps.

I just about lost this variety due to a number of unforeseen events and I hope the rescue effort works.

Tom Wagner
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