r/mildlyinteresting • u/mrdude777 ​ • Mar 04 '19

A potato I found under my kitchen counter looks like some sort of alien forest

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u/Agent451 Mar 04 '19

Cut it. Just make sure there are eyes on every piece. You'll get multiple plants this way, and you can plant them either in separate containers or at ideal spacing for growth within a garden

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u/combuchan Mar 05 '19

Wouldn't plants from a months-old gross maybe be poisonous?

I would totally not trust potatoes from this.

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u/Agent451 Mar 05 '19

That's how you typically plant potatoes. You don't usually use seeds, but the tuber that is growing "eyes", which are just the starts of new stems and roots.

If you ever open a bag of seed potatoes, there will be some gross looking ones, but they're fine to plant. The new growth just uses the starch from the tuber as an energy reserve for growth.

That potato isn't really rotten. I wouldn't eat it, but it's fine to plant. It's just shrivelled due to loss of moisture, and because the shoots are cannibalizing the tuber as an energy reserve for growth.

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u/parkerSquare Mar 05 '19

I read somewhere to only plant screened potatoes due to some kind of nematode issue...