Growing Chinese Potato in Garden Pots with Sand!

Chinese Potato is a delicacy in this region, available only in this season, from December to January usually. Chinese Potato is grown in central Kerala, India, mainly in regions with sandy soil. I have been trying to grow Chinese Potato in muddy red soil at home. Though they would grow well, there was no yield. Hence I thought of growing them in garden pots filled with surplus sand. Most important advantage noted when planted in sand was that harvesting was quite easy. You just have to pull the plants out manually to get the yield.

When it is grown in red soil, it is quite hard to look for the yield by carefully removing the soil at the roots and finally to find nothing. Another advantage found was that it was quite easy to skin the freshly harvested Chinese Potato as the skin was only loosely attached. When we buy from the market it is usually dry and firmly attached and difficult to skin. Often we have to soak it in water overnight and try. Moreover, product from the market usually has a lot of dirt over it, requiring meticulous cleaning. Homegrown Chinese Potato from sand pots have hardly any dirt and is quite easy to clean! So, if you are planning for home use only, this is a good option – grow it and eat it!

Tamil Nadu Agricultural University Agritech Portal has a nice informative article on growing Chinese Potato and is worth reading in full. Those planning cultivation on a larger scale should certainly read such articles and follow the detailed instructions available there regarding every aspect of cultivation, plant care procedures like irrigation, application of fertilizers, weeding, plant protection and harvesting. Mine is only an experimental plant cultivation at home as a hobby.

In this garden pot you can see a glimpse of a Bengal Gram plant growing among the Chinese Potato plants. That plant had come up spontaneously in the vegetable waste disposal area and I had replanted into this garden pot which had some remnants of Chinese Potato plants after harvesting. Now the Chinese Potato plants have overgrown the Bengal Gram plant, which is hardly visible with the tiny leaves among the dense canopy of Chinese Potato plants.

This is another garden pot in which the growth of Chinese Potato plants have not become so dense and you can clearly see the sand used to fill the garden pots. I have not used other conventional ingredients of potting mixture like mud, coco peat or cow dung powder in these garden pots, which were filled only with surplus sand at home.