Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 215, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 September 1914 — Growing Potatoes in Sawduet. [ARTICLE]

Growing Potatoes in Sawduet.

A half ibushel of sawdust, a dash of chemical solution and fifteen potatoes carefully enveloped with the sawdust will enable the average householder to grow a bushel of tubers on his housetop or in his cellar within sixty days. This process, says the Chicago Herald, has been discovered and elaborated. Moreover, the grower will have no potato bugs to contend ‘with, he wyi have no turning over of the soil at certain intervals, and there will be no contest with grubworms. The product of this process is termed the “vineless potato,” from the fact that, grown under these apparently unnatural conditions, there is no surface vegetation. Because of this each potato buried in the sawdust is enabled to produce at least twelve normal sized tubers. Operating on the theory that the presence of surface vegetation was only a method of securing nourishment, and in reality sapped the vitality of the tuber, the discoverer experimented more than six years, and found he could overcome this seemingly natural course on the part of the plant by supplying it artificially with its needs. By employing* sawdust, peat, straw or any other earth product that would permit of the circulation of air, moisture and hept and the application of solutions of various salts, he discovered that a single potato would multiply itself by attaching to itself from twelve to sixteen other potatoes of approximately the same dimensions without throwing off any of its energy above ground. Packed in loosely arranged bins permitting the free access of air and arranged in rows 6 inches above each other, with an allowance of 1 cubic foot of sawdust to the seedling, the discoverer has demonstrated the rapidity of growth and the proportions that the potatoes may attain by showing that within sixty days* fifteen potatoes will produce a bushel. In the character of his experiments and the success that has attended them tihe discoverer has the endorsement of Luther Burbank, the emineflt horticulturist and botanist.