Should you cut your potatoes into pieces before planting?

I started an experiment three months ago with three potato pots.

• In the first I planted a whole tuber
• In the second I planted a tuber cut in a piece so it had an eye on it
• In the third pot I planted a pull sprout. A pull sprout is where you wait till a tuber has sprouts on it and the sprouts are big enough that they are beginning to get little root nubs at the base of the sprout. You just pull the sprout off the tuber and plant.

Today I harvested them to let you know how each type of planting produces.

Unfortunately when I went to transfer the photos to my computer I found that the files were corrupted so I can't show you pics 

Over all, the whole tuber produced a plant that was twice the size of the others and had three stems, as three of the eyes had sprouted.
The pull sprout took the longest to start growing strongly as it has no energy from a tuber, but it did catch up to the cut tuber.

Results:

Because of the three stems all producing spuds the whole tuber plant produced the most tubers. But because of being in a pot, and the fact that the plant has only so much energy to put into tuber production it had the most tubers but they were all smallish. It produced 12 tubers

The cut tuber had the biggest tubers, but produced less than the whole tuber plant because it only had one stem. it produced 5 tubers but they were big.

The pull sprout had small tubers, probably because it took longer to grow at the start and less time to fatten them. it produces 7 small tubers.

This is a good experiment to work out how to plant your spuds to get the results you want. Maybe you prefer big tubers, or lots of tubers etc. If you have the room, cutting or pull sprouts is a good way to increase your plants as you get 3-6 plants from a single tuber (depending on whether you use cutting or sprouts), so if you can get more plants out of a tuber you will still get a bigger harvest than planting a single, whole tuber. I hope I have explained that ok.
It probably works out similar over all as far as weight of tubers.

I planted into these pots and transferred them into bigger pots once they were growing well

 This is the piece of tuber with an eye. I took off one sprout so that it was even with the pull sprout.












 A single pull sprout. This is how people in some countries plant their potatoes

Here in Australia we usually plant whole tubers or cut in half.