Mark Roelofs

Nancy Reading wrote:Like other people with a suitable climate I usually get volunteer potatoes popping up. I don't tend to encourage them, since the surprise appearance isn't always convenient for me. It is easy enough to overwinter the tubers indoors... I think if you do leave them in the ground then having a good polyculture is a reasonable defence against pest and diseases.

Yes, my plan is to let the potatoes grow during spring/summer. Then after harvest plant a winter covercrop. I do not have very harsch winters, and I can grow cold loving plants for quite some months after the potatoe harvest. Then maybe every year add some manure and plant some perrenials around the plots to see if i can have some sort of barrier or the potatoes to keep the potatoe plot the same size every year.

Anybody has an update about their experiments? I have seen my forgotten last year potatoes pop up this year. Soon i will harvest, but i already had a sneak peek and the potatoes looked pretty good. So i will start intentionally leaving potatoes in a plot as well starting after next years planting.

Just wondering whether somebody has some years of experience to share what to think about/look out for =)

Hi John,

Not sure if your questions are for me or for the thread owner, but i'll answer for me anyway.

I bought this house 1,5 years ago and everything is already in place regarding water. My collection point is very shallow, especially in the dry summer when i need the water. My plan is not to capture the silt and extract water from it. I'm capturing a lot a silt now because of the shallow collection point, and i want to have less silt in my water. Now my filters are full of silt very quickly, especially when i'm irrigating. So firstly i'm thinking about reducing the amount of silt in my collection point, although I think there is not much to do there...

I was watching the videos in the thread and i saw the 3 components of the water system: collection, silttrap, storage. I was just wandering what the function of the gravel is in the collection part of the system, and whether this would not fill up with silt and other debris over time.

My silt trap at the moment is my storage tank, but this is not very pratical. Also my irrigation line is connected before the tank (to have pressure at the upper part of my land), but it is very dirty. My storage tank also gets very dirty now.

I'm thinking of making a silt trap in between the collection and storage, because there is none now.

I'm also working on improving my water catchment system for my house. At the moment i'm hooked up to a river (that is going down the mountain), but in summer the flow is pretty low. (I live in the south of Spain) So at the moment i'm gathering a lot of silt in my tubes. More down below (~90m) from my catchment i have a big tank that settles all the silt, but i would prefer to not catch it in the first place.

I'm seeing 2 videos here about catchment systems that are holding the water and are filled with gravel. A tube is placed at a certain height (to avoid catching the silt im guessing) the gather the water. But to me, this catchment filled with gravel would, over time, completely fill with silt right? I feel that i'm missing something about this design. Can somebody explain this?