Growing Potatoes Naturally

I wanted to make this thread to help me keep track of and document growing my potatoes, with hopefully minimal work and maximum harvests!

They won't be irrigated, fertilized, or sprayed with anything, not even organic fertilizers or sprays, just naturally healthy soil, rain and sunshine! With minimal care, they can be truly enjoyed to the fullest! Bring on the yummy harvests!

Hopefully it can be helpful to others also!

If you'd like to stay up to date with the latest videos of what I'm growing and see monthly food forest tours, you can subscribe to my Youtube channel HERE by clicking the red subscribe button! I'd love to have you join me for this journey!

I planted my potatoes later than I wanted to this year. By late May they were coming up well!

They are growing in between my fruit trees in my young food forest.

In addition to the regular raised beds growing potatoes intensively and annually, I decided to plant some leftover seed potatoes in my regular clay soil in odd corners of the yard.

My goal is to see if I can create a self-sustaining permaculture potato crop. Even if disease makes it lower yield than the intensively managed and rotated beds, it may still be worthwhile in parts of the yard that would otherwise be unused.

One potato was planted under the stairs leading to an outbuilding, one on bare ground where a structure was recently removed, and several along the edge of the woods.

We'll see what happens. The plants are definitely growing, but I don't know what the yield will be or whether they will spread and propagate themselves.

Sounds like a great plan Cathy!

How (deep) did you plant them? How deep is your (straw?) mulch?

We have 2 main potato beds this year. One is in a primo location and was drip irrigated during a dry spell, the other was built carelessly, planted haphazardly and mostly ignored. I'm really eager to see the results. We also have a few "True Potato Seed" plants that seem to be struggling, but are producing tubers. This is more exciting than Christmas.

Cathy James wrote:In addition to the regular raised beds growing potatoes intensively and annually, I decided to plant some leftover seed potatoes in my regular clay soil in odd corners of the yard.

My goal is to see if I can create a self-sustaining permaculture potato crop.

Haha, I did the same thing this year. Dug trenches in poor soil, in out of the way places, just to see what would happen. I can abandon them if I want and nobody will know. I doubt they will produce much of anything. But I think it would be interesting to have a reservoir of seed, and meanwhile build soil.

R. Han wrote:How (deep) did you plant them? How deep is your (straw?) mulch?

I planted a lot of them really quickly, and the soil I planted them in this year was very compacted, so I only planted them about 1 to 2 inches deep. They have done pretty well despite that, but I've had better luck planting them about 3 to 4 inches deep in the past, so I'll probably aim to plant them a little deeper next year.

The mulch was about an inch or less when I put it down. Now it's probably a cm or less. It was all chop and drop of wild plants. I let the wild plants grow up last year, and used a swing blade to cut them down in the areas I planted and used them as mulch. It seemed to be a pretty good mulch for them, and I think the diversity of plants in the mulch provides a great diversity of nutrients for the potatoes. I've let the wild plants grow up around them again now, and the potatoes have done well. If the wild plants start shading the potatoes, I just trim them back some.

Did you make holes in the mulch for the potatoes or do they poke through the mulch themselves?
What tool did you use for digging? Did you make a trench for a row or indivudual holes?

Sorry for asking such details, but i think it helps for reproducibility.

I somehow missed seeing this post until now, sorry about that.

R. Han wrote:Did you make holes in the mulch for the potatoes or do they poke through the mulch themselves?

They poked through themselves since the mulch was pretty thin.

What tool did you use for digging?

I used a hand shovel.

Did you make a trench for a row or indivudual holes?

Just individual holes

Sorry for asking such details, but i think it helps for reproducibility.

No problem at all, I think questions are awesome, and also like you mentioned, it helps a lot with reproducibility!

Here’s a YouTube post from one of my favourite gardeners. He didn’t intend to leave his potatoes unattended but due to personally circumstances, they were. He grows them in containers though. However, there’s plenty of information and tips included. As for not watering - I lived in Wales for a few years as a kid. It seemed to rain almost everyday!

I harvested one of our potato beds yesterday and may have stumbled onto something worthwhile. This was a new bed created in a low spot that had recently been cleared of trees and brush. Because it was low and I knew it got seasonally soggy, I wanted to build it up a little. I had a bunch of old, dry poplar logs that were semi-rotten, so I split them into half-logs and laid them down with sand and topsoil filling the gaps and covering them all. I did a crude job of it, so some logs were sticking up here and there, but the whole bed got covered with bark and leaves as mulch.
When I planted potatoes this spring, I pulled back the mulch, made a divot in the soil and laid the seed potatoes in the divots. In some spots, the divot exposed some of the poplar logs. I didn't care though, because this bed was a freebie, last-minute creation and the seed potatoes were extras that we had over-wintered in our root cellar. The goal was to be as lazy and cheap as possible and see how it turned out.
Most of the plants produced less than 3/4 pounds of potatoes each, but there were three plants out of the 75-ish that produced 2-5 pounds each. All of these plants were on the edge of the bed where there were logs near surface, and the biggest individual potato was deformed from growing right against a log. I'm thinking there is a connection and I'm eager to build a test bed to see if logs can be used to increase yield. I'm assuming that the logs absorbed rain water and nurtured the plants through our dry season, giving them an advantage over other plants that weren't close enough to a log.

 

To me it seems like as long as the potatoes have some decent moisture when they're planted, they don't care what happens afterwards. I used to plant mine quite deep, as much as a foot down. Now I just lay them on the top of the soil and mulch really well so the potatoes don't green. The mulch keeps the moisture in, too. I've planted them on sod, on nice fluffy bare soil, in half assed hugels like Michael's. I've mulched with leaves, straw, grass clippings, small tree branches, giant radish plants, miscellaneous weeds. It all seems to work fine. I love growing potatoes.

This year we had a really dry spring and i planted my potatoes a bit late. The soil was dry by the time I planted them. Then we had the heat dome. This was the first year my potatoes have struggled. They didn't grow for the month or so it was really hot, but once it cooled down they were off. I haven't harvested yet, I'm growing eight or nine new varieties, and I planted in a gopher metropolis, so not sure what I'll find. Almost all the plants look pretty happy topside, though.

We are in the second year using a deep mulch / Ruth Stout type of system (no hilling) for establishing growing beds in what was fallow pastureland on heavy clay soil.
The area has no fencing or irrigation.

The land was initially tilled with a tractor, and most of the beds were formed with rototillers. But the abundance of large rocks damaged the equipment before we could form the last 2 beds. We would have needed a pick axe to form those, so instead, we just placed the potatoes on top of the soil and covered them with the mulch.

This year we had drought and late killing frost. The deer were constantly eating the green tops down to the ground, and then we had a potato beetle infestation.

I fully expected the system to fail, but even though we had no rain for almost 3 months, and very hot temperatures, we didn't water them because we wanted to see just how far this system would go before collapse.

During the beetle infestation, we squished the larvae initially, and a week later came back to squish the rest, but noticed there were a lot of ladybugs on the plants so we just squashed the really big larvae. A week later there were lady bug larvae everywhere, and a week after that, we could hardly find a potato beetle larvae. There was quite a bit of foliage damage, to add to the deer browse.

The plants never grew big, and they didn't flower. We planted fava beans in with the potatoes, and they did really well.

Last weekend we began to harvest the potatoes and we have an excellent crop. Much better than last year.
The soil is much more friable, and the amount of worms and other soil life has exploded. I was able to use a garden fork in the beds that were previously like concrete, and many of the large rocks are coming to the surface where we can easily pull them out and place them to the side.

Nick Kitchener wrote:We are in the second year using a deep mulch / Ruth Stout type of system (no hilling)

That's great to hear, Nick. We've done a partial Ruth Stout version, wherein my spouse plants the potatoes deep while I pretend to, but don't. Then, everything gets covered in a few inches or more of mulch.
I'm nearly done harvesting and can attest to the enormous benefits to not burying the seed potatoes, My bed, which was full-on Stout-style was a joy to harvest, whereas the rest is back-breaking.

This looks like an awesome approach. Last summer I grew two varieties of potatoes right on the surface of the soil with drip irrigation and under 8+ inches of straw mulch. The yields would have been much better if not for the savagery of the pillbugs and earwigs that share my garden. This summer I'll cover the seed potatoes with about an inch of compost plus the same deep mulch and hope for less insect damage but the same ease of harvesting. Seeing the success in these posts with drought I might try a patch with no irrigation besides what's required to get them going. Could it be possible to mostly dry farm potatoes in a super-hot, dry California climate?