A lot of the time I've chitted up a shop purchased potatoes we've enjoyed sneaked from the kitchen .
So long as it is a medium egg size , I then put the spud eyes up in a paper mache egg box cup fitting & leave them on the bedroom window cill on a north facing window till it chits up .
TIP during WW2 int eh UK the German prisoners of war used to try and thwart the war effort .
So they would plant potatoes inthe farmers fields upside down , they also took too breaking the potatoes in half pushing the break face down in the soil . It didn't do them much good for the upside down spuds gre nirmally & most of the time the broken spud part also grew into full crop bearing plants.
The broken potato thing was discovered early on by a Yorkshire farmer who also spoke fluent German when he heard the prisoners talking , bragging & laughing about what they had done .
It was reported to the Ministry of Food , trials were undertaken to see what the true long term effect would be .
Sometimes the halves rotted , sometimes they grew . It was found out that the potatoes that bled the most starch were the ones th at rotted the most .
Further experiments were undertaken ..it was found that dipping the cut face of the potato in garden lime caused it to stop bleeding . The lime would also help release nutrients in the soil for the potato to take up ( WIN WIN
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It was also discovered that so long as you have one eye on the treated part that you have a very good chance of growing a health plant from it .
It wasn't long before the mathematicians got going and worked out that by quartering every seed potato , ensuring there was at least one eye in each part & liming the cuts that you could reduce the amount of seed stocks held back. Thus making more potatoes available to the close on starving population of the UK .
When I first read of the idea at Christmas 199 3 I begged four seed spuds of a farmer friend , told him why & what I was going to do .
We got 13 well stocked plants from the 16 quarters I planted .... so I know it works & is not fairy stories