 What if I told you there is a way to produce 200 potato plants from a single tuber? It's called the pull out pull sprout method, also known as sprout jacking. Seriously, this is for YouTube, right? The pull sprout method is a technique for the rapid propagation of potatoes and other tubers, and it's sometimes used by breeders to rapidly increase the quantities of the rarest varieties. But it can also be used by gardeners who have limited access to seed potatoes or by growers who have limited means to produce all of the plants that they require from just one or two potatoes. Some sources suggest the pull sprouts can be used to limit the spread of disease from either homegrown or store bought potatoes. Of course, this is never going to be as effective as the micro propagation that are taken in sterile laboratories for the commercial potato industry. But it's another tool in our arsenal as home growers. The pull sprout method depends on a peculiar trait of potatoes and other tubers, whereby each eye on the potato contains multiple buds, and once the dominant sprout is removed, the other buds awaken. That's how some growers report getting 200 plants out of a single tuber. Most growers plant whole or cut potatoes in pots or shallow trays. Soil is important to encourage the sprouts to root. But I had to take it a step further. You see, I'd learned that people, especially during the Great Depression, would grow their potato plants from just the peels so that they could still eat the tubers. I wanted to see if I could combine these two techniques so that I could maximize the number of plants I get while also maximizing the food value of my tubers. And because I'm notorious for forgetting to water pot of plants, I decided to make myself a little DIY self watering planter so that this could be a project that I could basically set and forget until planting time. For the self watering planter, you're going to need a container, preferably one that you can drill a drainage hole in. But I've got to work around if you don't. A plastic cup with three or four slits cut into the sides, gravel, glass beads, or some other kind of drainage material to fill the reservoir, an old t-shirt, rag, landscape fabric, burlap sack, or some other kind of material that you can place in between the water reservoir and your potting soil. And then you're going to need your potting soil or compost of choice in order to fill up the planter. If you cannot add a drainage hole to your container, then you'll also need a thin strip of cardboard that's at least as long as your pipe to act as a dipstick. To construct the self watering planter, place your cup with slits in one corner of the container and place your pipe in the opposite corner. Start adding your gravel or other drainage material up to the level of the cup. On top of the gravel, you'll want to add your old t-shirt or burlap or whatever barrier you're using. Be sure to snug it in around the cup and the pipe as well as you can, although perfection isn't important. Just make sure that most of the soil isn't going to fall down into the gravel. Then fill up the cup with your compost or potting soil and then add another layer, maybe an inch or so, into the planter to cover up the barrier. If you're adding a drainage hole to your planter, you'll want to drill a hole in the side of the container just below the level of the gravel. If you're not adding a drainage hole, then what you'll want to do is put your strip of cardboard down into the bottom of the container and mark a line just below the level of the gravel. This will allow you to check the level of the water as you're adding it to the reservoir. Now add water through the pipe and if your potting medium isn't already fairly moist, then you may need to add some additional water on top just to prime the wicking action of the planter. Now let's prep the potatoes. Welcome back to Binging with Stone Tape and today we're going to discuss how to prepare potatoes to grow pull sprouts from the peels. We're going to need one or more potatoes with or without the sprouts and we're going to need a good clean kitchen knife. Let's get started. First you're going to want to inspect the potato and especially here on the ends we want to be careful to cut them off and leave as many buds intact as possible and we'll go ahead and do the other end. Sometimes it can be a bit of a weird angle. This will work just fine and once we have those separated it's time to turn the potato up on end. Now we just want to carefully take slices down the sides again being careful to keep as many buds intact as possible and you want to do a fairly thick slice. We want to keep as much flesh on to support the growing sprouts as possible but we still want to leave some potato left to eat at the end. We're going to continue around the potato like so and before you know it we are done. This can be cubed up as one will for cooking later. What we're after right now are these peels. Now that the potatoes are prepped just add a layer of peels to your planter and then add a fine layer of soil over the top. If you've decided to go with a pot or a tray go ahead and add your layer of peels just same and make sure to keep the soil slightly damp. There are no leaves and roots yet so you don't want to get it too wet otherwise your peels might just rot. If you're a little extra extra like me then you can continue to add layers of potato and layers of compost on top just know that it's going to make the next step a little bit trickier. Eventually your peels will sprout and your sprouts will form roots and at that time you can remove them as roots then it's time to plant them. If you've still got a bit of time before your weather warms up then you can pot them up and hang on to them until it's time for them to go in the ground. Did I mention that I'm really bad at remembering to water potted plants? As you can see some of the lower leaves here have dried up and felled off because I missed a few waterings but as we can see it's developing some pretty good roots. The ones that I left in the stealth watering container started to get a little bit laggy so what I've done is I've gone ahead and trimmed them off and I'm just seeing if I can get them to root in water like their cousin the tomato. Another thing that I'm experimenting with is removing the sprouts that are starting to form on store-bought potatoes and just seeing how they'll root in water rather than trying to grow whole sprouts in soil. You can see that they're starting to form roots. Here's the small patch that I set aside for growing pole sprouts separately from my Andy and potato breeding project which I mentioned in my video on growing everything on contour. Those will be grown from true potato seeds. Here I've got our hiding in the shade because it's hot. Here I've got the fresh pole sprouts that we took today as well as our little potted guy. Let's get them in the ground and show you how that goes. So what I've done here is just pull aside the mulch and because the pole sprouts are kind of thin and don't have a lot of roots on them what I like to do is use a screwdriver and just put a nice deep hole in there and wiggle it around to make it nice and wide give them plenty of room to go in and then just take the pole sprouts and drop it in the hole. I get as deep as I can. Got a little bit of compost here and I'm going to fill in around it and then pull the mulch back in around the potato. For a potted guy it's got a little bit bigger of a root system so I'm going to head and use this trowel here to dig out a nice little hole for it and we'll just drop him in the ground and fill back in around with some of the soil that we removed then I'll add some of that compost around it out. Just pull the mulch back in around and then water it in really well. This guy should be happy. Pole sprouts are a great way to stretch your dollar or conserve rare varieties. Hit the subscribe button now to find out how the yields of these pole sprouts compare to traditional planting techniques as well as find out how I rapidly propagate other lost inking crops like oka, mashua, and uyuko. Thanks for watching have a good one. Subscribe to the channel now for future permaculture experiments and then select one of these videos to continue the journey.