Potatoes, wood chips and compost

I have lousy soil, mostly clay and sand. I want to grow potatoes and I see that some people put the potatoes in dirt and mound 8 inches to wood chips over them. I know wood chips have no nutrition. How much soil do I need to put the seed potatoes in. I'm thinking make  trench 2-3 inches deep, lay the potatoes, cover each seed with a foot wide by 3 inch deep layer of compost and then cover the whole row with 8 inches of chips. Will something like this work?
Do just the roots need good soil or do the tubers also require good soil?
I tried container planting last year and only got around 4-6 good potatoes (and a few runts) per plant.

Dar Helwig wrote:I have lousy soil, mostly clay and sand. I want to grow potatoes and I see that some people put the potatoes in dirt and mound 8 inches to wood chips over them. I know wood chips have no nutrition. How much soil do I need to put the seed potatoes in. I'm thinking make  trench 2-3 inches deep, lay the potatoes, cover each seed with a foot wide by 3 inch deep layer of compost and then cover the whole row with 8 inches of chips. Will something like this work?
Do just the roots need good soil or do the tubers also require good soil?
I tried container planting last year and only got around 4-6 good potatoes (and a few runts) per plant.

Im pretty new to growing potatoes. I tried a couple burlap sacks filled with soil and that went poorly. Too hard to keep them watered in burlap.

The next try was a first year hugelkulture and that actually went quite well.

The next try was this: lay seed potatoes on the grass, put a couple handfuls of soil on them and bury them in straw. That was by far the easiest method but also yielded the least potatoes. Ive never tried woodchips.

I would suggest maybe loosening the soil a bit first and using more than a handful of soil on top of the seed potatoes before burying them in your woodchips. Cant hurt to try!

What you describe would work, in my experience. I plant mine similar to yours: on the surface with about that much compost. I would probably do more of a long mound rather than a flat 12x3 row of compost. I mulch between the rows with cardboard and then pile on woodchips. One problem with woodchips is they draw out nitrogen when they decompose. Maybe woodchips between the rows and then wet, rotting straw on top of the rows. The straw keeps the temp on the soil down. Make sure to keep the rows mounded as the season goes to keep the potatoes covered and not green (re-pile or add more straw).
The tubers themselves don't need rich soil, they need soil that is easily movable so they can expand (i.e., not clay). The richer the soil for the roots, the better the production, generally.
My org did some research on this you can see here: https://lowtechinstitute.org/category/research/no-2-potato-growing-methods/.

Best wishes on your potato project from Kentucky zone 6b…I had some organic grocery potatoes in the house that sprouted while I was on a trip. Yesterday, I planted them in tote bags. I put 4 inches of soil in the bottom and placed 2 spuds on the soil in each bag.  They were too small to cut and only had one chit each. I covered them with 6 inches of a homemade dirt mixture…. 1 part coco coir, 2 parts mushroom compost, 1 part perlite. Then I filled the remainder of the bag with  leaves. I’m out of soil mix, but when I make some more, I’ll top it off and put straw on top for additional mulch.

Additionally, in 2020 I grew potatoes in grow bags and other containers and set them on pallets to allow good drainage.

I also had a “row” of potatoes because I ran out of totes and buckets. I laid cardboard and made raised edges with logs and broken pallet planks.

For both areas, I filled it with 4 inches of 25 day homemade compost made from sawdust, horse manure and water that was turned every three days.

I put the potatoes on that and covered it with 6 inches of the same. Then I mulched with rotty straw. I kept adding straw to the totes and row as the potatoes grew. I was happy with the yield for my first try.

I have a 30ft by 10 ft area of nothing but 9 month old wood chips.  I will dig a hole and put down compost soil mix (homemade) and on each I will plant potato and melons.  Dr. Redhawk mentioned that you can grow in straight wood chips but I expect they must be old and breaking down into compost.

  Spuds only need a covering to keep from drying out. The roots will go down and find whatever else they need.
  The best potato patch I ever saw: A lady I knew used to rake her garden leaves under a big evergreen. The tree shielded them from rain so they composted slowly. One day she threw in some kitchen scraps, and the potato peelings started to grow.
 After that she had only to rummage around in the leaves and pull out handfuls of potatoes. Sure beats digging.

When we were kids, we'd go down to the creek and catch a bunch of Chubs & Shiners. Drop a fish and a spud into each planting spot (about a foot apart) and you'll have some Big Ole taters happily growing

Fertility in wood chips comes after a couple of years from all the creepy crawlies that work it over.  8" to 12" thick is what I recommend.  Even here in dry NM at 7000 ft. that 8" - 12" disappears in a season and becomes 1" - 2" covering all the work of the crawlies, So I add about 4" - 6" every year and I never till.  That being said, since you have sandy clay, simply do the lasagna  method and add in a layer of manure, placing the manure under the potatoes.  The nitrogen deficiency is only at the soil/wood chip horizon or interface where the microbes need the nitrogen to break down all of the carbon in the chips, and the potatoes need that nitrogen boost when they first sprout.  I would also recommend and organic trifecta fertilizer, especially if this is your first planting in poor soil.  When I use wood chips I add in a mycorrhizal inoculant for the fungi that will be working over the wood chips.  I only do this once and I quit digging.  The only digging I do is moving material away from the spuds when I am hungry then I put it right back.  I also like Paul Gaucci's method of planting the largest potatoes you find during harvest.  Just put the biggest ones back in the soil and cover them up.  So far, here where occasionally it hits -10 deg. F., the buried/left behind spuds have not frozen, granted I put them about 8" - 10" deep and cover them with another 4" of wood chips.  Burying them that deep means it will be a little bit of a stretch before the soil warms enough for them to break through, but they do break through, all the time.  Since I am on a well, I use drip irrigation and each spud is buried right beneath an emitter.  Come spring time, I turn on the system and walk away except for the occasional fly-by to yank a weed or two.  Those wood chips are quite good at suppressing the weedy competition.  

When we moved to our new place a few years ago there was a dirt mound that pretty much grew weeds and rocks. We put down 8-12 inches of pine and spruce chips on the mound. The next year I just dug down into the chips until I hit soil then set the tuber on the dirt and covered with chips. The potatoes were amazingly happy and gave us 45 pounds of spuds for very little work. We had to dig down into the dirt to harvest all of the potatoes. They had grown into the hard soil about 4 inches and set tubers. So digging a trench may not be necessary if you have a large layer of mulch. Maybe try it both ways and see if it makes a difference.

I planted my potatoes in old wood mulch. Mostly course stuff for wood pellet making. Best crop ever. And real easy to harvest. Never put them in soil again. I don't remember fertilizer being added but maybe.

Dar Helwig wrote:I have lousy soil, mostly clay and sand. I want to grow potatoes and I see that some people put the potatoes in dirt and mound 8 inches to wood chips over them. I know wood chips have no nutrition. How much soil do I need to put the seed potatoes in. I'm thinking make  trench 2-3 inches deep, lay the potatoes, cover each seed with a foot wide by 3 inch deep layer of compost and then cover the whole row with 8 inches of chips. Will something like this work?
Do just the roots need good soil or do the tubers also require good soil?
I tried container planting last year and only got around 4-6 good potatoes (and a few runts) per plant.

What you are suggesting most likely will work.

Wood chips do add a lot to the soil as they break down.  All kinds of nice microbes that worms like.

I read about planting potatoes in a cardboard box which I thought was really neat because at the end of the growing season when ready to harvest a person just picks up the box and the potatoes fall out so there is no digging to find them:

https://permies.com/t/156626/Lazy-grow-potatoes-farm#1228225

Another thread you or others might find interesting:

https://permies.com/t/145706/Growing-dig-potatoes

Dar Helwig wrote:I have lousy soil, mostly clay and sand. I want to grow potatoes and I see that some people put the potatoes in dirt and mound 8 inches to wood chips over them. I know wood chips have no nutrition. How much soil do I need to put the seed potatoes in. I'm thinking make  trench 2-3 inches deep, lay the potatoes, cover each seed with a foot wide by 3 inch deep layer of compost and then cover the whole row with 8 inches of chips. Will something like this work?
Do just the roots need good soil or do the tubers also require good soil?
I tried container planting last year and only got around 4-6 good potatoes (and a few runts) per plant.

Hmmm... clay and sand. Indeed, you have pretty poor soil. You didn't mention your Ph, but it should be 6-6.5, ideally. Correct it if it deviates too much from that. So you essentially have 2 of the 3 components for "adobe" AKA: A mudbrick.
I live in the Central Sands of Wisconsin, where we grow lots and lots of potatoes. The soil is *extremely sandy*. The "pros" just fertilize the poop out of it, which is not the best way in a garden setting, where your private well may get contaminated as sand will leach all that chemical fertilizer to the aquifer. [I'm a water officer for my Town, essentially to report on what is the best way to keep our water from contamination, and we have a lot of contamination from large annual rows farming...]
For your situation, I would grow in raised beds to get away from that clay. For the "long term improvement", you might want to use fall leaves if you can: Not only are they more nutritious than chips but they invite great biome to do part of the work for you. This is what is recommended in my neck of the woods [and we do really "GGgrreat"]
https://eatwisconsinpotatoes.com/spring-is-here-time-to-plant-your-potatoes/
The trench system works really well here because our soil is so sandy: It will never get waterlogged. In clayish soil, the trench would be only 4" [if that] if you opt not to make raised beds. 6-8" is way over the top for clayish soil. Having the spud seeds in trenches at first means that they will benefit from cold spring rains and get a good start, without need for too much watering later.
Now cover your seedlings with just enough soil to check their growth [like 1-2"]. As they start growing, start adding soil to the trench. This will be done here about 3 times a season in my garden: I stand on one side of the bed and rake up stuff  from the farther alley over the row of spuds. Weeding is done at the same time. Disturbing /building up the bed also prevents mice and voles from eating everything. [In formal beds, you will have less rodents, perhaps because they have to come way out of the ground to go over the "wall" and that exposes them to predators from the sky].
Depending how large a planting, you may want to add a copious amount of bone meal in the trench at planting time as it decomposes and nourishes your potatoes over the whole season. In beds, you can "target" the bone meal more successfully. If you have them, leaves will also improve the *structure* of your soil. [I typically bring in about 100 bags of leaves which I spread over the whole garden in the Fall. In the Spring, I only have the trouble of parting the rows and depositing my spuds [A la Ruth Stout]. Then, I keep piling decomposed leaves, mixed with some of my local soil, with a rake or a hoe. By the end of the Season, my rows tower over my local soil, maybe a foot/ 1.5 Ft. All I have to do to harvest is gather the whole plant in my hands and easily lift it out of the soil, then dig around to find 'lost souls'.
Indeed, wood chips are not a great addition, although if towards Fall you could put a small load in the *valleys* for the following year, that would also keep your spuds clean as you harvest them and the chips would then degrade and your soil would definitely improve [think of it as hügelkultur  where decomposing wood really nourishes the soil]. If you have a chipper handy, you might want to run them through as the smaller the particles, the easier they will incorporate. If you have only one small bed, you could try wood pellets, which is like sawdust that is formed into pellets [But yeah, that is expensive]. Rain will help it fall apart and the rate of absorption/ decomposition will be greatly improved.
You also mentioned straw. I have not had good results with straw because it attracts mice and voles. In your situation, clay plus straw might also pack really tight when rain is added, but I don't know your exact situation. The idea is to keep the soil friable.
Good luck to you.

Dennis Bangham wrote:I have a 30ft by 10 ft area of nothing but 9 month old wood chips.  I will dig a hole and put down compost soil mix (homemade) and on each I will plant potato and melons.  Dr. Redhawk mentioned that you can grow in straight wood chips but I expect they must be old and breaking down into compost.

This sounds a lot like the "Back To Eden" method.
Can't remember the guy's name, but, he is really happy with his results.
It might be worth watching his video.
It's not quite permaculture, but, it's pretty earth friendly.

@Dar
I just want to throw out one reality check on the woodchips with potatoes. Someone already mentioned that it is not a problem with nitrogen unless you mix them in. I want to warn you, that while I knew this, and while I piled on woodchips to my potatoes and while they did fantastic.... when I went to harvest, I had quite a messed up pile of woodchips and dirt with no easy way to separate them back out to make sure the chips went back on top. Not a deal breaker, but something to think about when you actually go to harvest. I think I'll be adding some extra nitrogen to that spot.

@Phil - His name was Paul Gautschi. The Back to Eden documentary was quite well done, I thought.

Thank you all for your insightful replies. That's a lot of information to ponder. I'm sure I'll be back for more.

Sand and clay is wonderful parent material.

As someone said wood chips robbing the soil of nitrogen  is only temporary.  A couple easy fixes for that low nitrogen phase:  kelp adds nitrogen- and all the other minerals in sea water.  Readily available in farming country is alfalfa… very nitrogen rich!  Available in bale and pellet form.

Another nitrogen source is coffee grounds, and of course urine from any mammals, chicken manure, and aerated compost “tea”.  I add the quotes because when I first encountered the term, I perforated a bucket, filled it with semi composted manure, immersed the bucket in water, and thought the liquid, once steeped and bucket of stuffed removed was “compost tea”.
It was decent fertilizer if applied judiciously, but not something to use on vegetables right before harvest.  But then neither is fish emulsion, for maybe a different reason 😊

For other nitrogen sources, look at compost resources, they list some unexpected sources, like feathers.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:Sand and clay is wonderful parent material.
For other nitrogen sources, look at compost resources, they list some unexpected sources, like feathers.

Indeed. I wish that when I take my chickens to be butchered, I could keep the feathers.
Unfortunately, by law here in Wisconsin, the feathers must be soaked in bleach before they are taken to the dump.
The only way for me to keep my chickens feathers is to butcher them myself. but Gosh! what a stupid law! what a waste!
1/ Adding bleach is more costly than it has to be.
2/We lose all this nitrogen and so folks will be tempted to make that up by buying artificial nitrogen,
3/ These feathers won't decompose as fast at the dump after they are soaked in bleach.
4/ Plus the room they occupy! I wish we could change this here, in Central Wisconsin.

Ah yes, the high price of ignorance!!!  😊

I have bought old feather pillows at yard sales, though they are getting harder to find.

Wool is also a good source of nitrogen, and human hair.  Maybe you could find a hair dresser who would let you have his/her trimmings!?

Thekla McDaniels wrote:Ah yes, the high price of ignorance!!!  😊
I have bought old feather pillows at yard sales, though they are getting harder to find.
Wool is also a good source of nitrogen, and human hair.  Maybe you could find a hair dresser who would let you have his/her trimmings!?

I do not grow sheep, so the wool is out for me but ...
What a great idea: My hairdresser was complaining about having all that hair to get rid of. Thanks! When I clean my hairbrush, I hang the hair on trees nearby. Birds can take advantage of soft hairs to make nesting materials. But yes, I could bury it in the garden as well.

Dar Helwig wrote:I'm thinking make  trench 2-3 inches deep, lay the potatoes, cover each seed with a foot wide by 3 inch deep layer of compost and then cover the whole row with 8 inches of chips. Will something like this work?

What kind of wood chips?  I once asked a local tree trimming place to dump a load on my land. Those were coarse chips 2-3 inches long mixed with lots of moldy pine needles. They took forever to break down, not very useful to me.

I have a long road to maintain and make my own chips with a small modified chipper. The machine takes up to 3" branches so it's mostly ramial wood. Chip size is at most 1", I only chip green wood preferably with leaves on and mixed with other greenery from roadside weeds. I really doubt nitrogen is a problem. Because of all the green stuff mixed with the chips an amazing amount of worms quickly move in. I would assume that the green material plus the worm castings would help fix nitrogen issues, if any.

I dig a shallow trench, plant potatoes then hill them up twice with fresh chips as the season progresses. At harvest time I'm left with a surface crust of woody stuff held together by mycelium while the inside looks a lot like soil.

I have been watching this thread with great interest but I have not had the chance recently to comment until now.  I thought I would add my ow experience growing potatoes on woodchips.

In the spring of 2020 I had a raised garden bed filled with wood chips that were heavily decomposed by Wine Cap mushrooms.  I had previously grown tomatoes and summer squash in addition to peas so I knew the compost was highly fertile.  I wanted to see how potatoes did.

I went out and laid down a bunch of potatoes, basically filling up the bed and then topped the bed with a thick 10” layer of fresh wood chips.  I hoped the new layer of wood chips would get inoculated from below and the potatoes would grow easily in the loose material.  Neither happened.

Turns out that my 10” of new chips swamped my old starting mixture and while I did get potatoes, they were nothing special—few in number and small in size.  If I do this again, I will try planting in actual soil and maybe not make the top layer so thick.

Eric

Dog groomers could be another good source of hair.
Your own urine is another great source of nitrogen.  Just dilute it before applying.  

Eric Hanson wrote:
I went out and laid down a bunch of potatoes, basically filling up the bed and then topped the bed with a thick 10” layer of fresh wood chips.  I hoped the new layer of wood chips would get inoculated from below and the potatoes would grow easily in the loose material.  Neither happened.

Turns out that my 10” of new chips swamped my old starting mixture and while I did get potatoes, they were nothing special—few in number and small in size.  If I do this again, I will try planting in actual soil and maybe not make the top layer so thick.

Eric

How sad!
I am just wondering if stirring the old chips with half the new before planting would have worked, then adding more a little later after the plants were growing….

Hi Thekla.  If I were doing it over again I would first dig in the potatoes as if I were planting potatoes in regular soil.  I would still add some wood chips, but I would only add about 4-6 inches.  Something that I have learned the hard way the last couple of years is that it is possible to suffocate an old layer of wood chips/spawn by adding too thick a layer of new wood chips.  Also, Wine Caps like to have their feet in some soil to begin with.  I don't know if the thick layer of composted chips would count as soil or not for the purposes of the Wine Caps, but maybe I could crumble up some top soil on to the top layer.  I thought I could use pure wood chips and maybe I can, but not at this stage at least.  I will let you know if I can make anything happen from this bed this year.

Eric

Are wine caps the same as king stropharia?  I bought spawn and have naturalized them in my garden.  They actually fruit under plants that create lots of shade with their leaves… and also increase the humidity.  To have mushrooms in desert conditions is rare.

I love them

Thekla McDaniels wrote:Are wine caps the same as king stropharia?  I bought spawn and have naturalized them in my garden.  They actually fruit under plants that create lots of shade with their leaves… and also increase the humidity.  To have mushrooms in desert conditions is rare.
I love them

Yep: King Stropharia are the wine caps. I planted them in my garden but I think there was too much sun there. [And I'm in zone 4b. I'm growing mine in straws and in wood chips and now I planted them on the north side of the house, so quite shaded. Indeed, you are correct about them loving shade: On the north side of the house, they really grew well right under the hostas. In between, they grew as well, but it was one here, one there. Under the hostas, I would find 10-15, so they really like it shady!
They do tend to naturalize a bit: The ones that grew the first year seem to have grown into the next 2 beds.

Don't forget to dump your grass clippings on the potatoes - they love them!

A little backstory: spring of 2020 i topped a bunch of cottonwood trees to open up a view and made a roughly 15'x25' mound of the branches about 2'-3' tall.  i capped that with purchased soil with a tractor driving on it until it was more soil then branches (lots of branches sticking through the soil still).  
Summer of 2020 i planted potatoes by just setting them on the soil and topping the entire mound with about +/- 1' of old hay.  The potatoes did really well and the new potatoes grew right on top of the soil, not in it, but below the hay.  No watering all summer and really easy to harvest!
Spring of 2021 I did the same as 2020 but only had about +/-6" of hay to cover them and most of it really broken down but it still performed really well, a few slightly green potatoes but not bad.
Spring of 2022 I planted my potato patch this year in the same spot but didn't have any hay but did get a load of woodchips with quite a bit of leaves in them.  i put the potatoes on the ground, added a relatively level shovel full of compost on the potatoes (barely enough to cover the seed potato) and then topped the whole bed with about 4"-6" of fresh wood chips.  The potatoes also performed well this year.  they were harder to harvest then the hay but still not too bad and I would call it a success.
If I was to make new garden space on lawn and I had the choice, I would lay cardboard down, set a scoop of compost, seed potato, another scoop of compost and cover with 1' of hay or straw, wipe my hands with a smile and call it a day!

Add to the above - I did have a just a few of the cottonwoods send up suckers, so I did pull some the first year so they wouldn't get established.

I grow my potato dome way like that. I use this method to grow my garden a little bit esch year. I cut down the grass very short, lay down newspaper or cardboarf, add the potatoes, add compost or black earth and 6-12inch of mulch. I'm doing nothing more for the summer and harvest an average of 10feet cube of potatoes each yeah like that. 1-2year like that is a good starter for my poor soil.

Adding my observations after many tears of trying different things and also having worked on potato harvesting machines:  Size, number and quality of potatoes produced depends on consistent access to water by the roots but a dry layer of covering where the tubers form.  When roots run out of water the tubers stop increasing   in size. If they get water before the tops die they may start again making a lumpy tuber or more small tubers.

For growing in bags I found out this year that putting the bags  in a shallow pan and keeping water in it the top of the bag with loos material would stay dry but the roots could have constant access to water.

 Wet organic  material that is trying to break down into soil will have soil life that will invade the tubers for sugars making scars on the skins.

So rich water holding soil below the seed tuber and dry nutrient poor sand or mulch above.  Principles rather than formulas.

I have 4 acres of heavy clay soil that is hard to grow anything in. I have been hauling in bags of leaves every fall from anyone who will let me have them. I have added lots of grass clippings and all my kitchen scraps go into the same pile. I have planted potatoes in this leaf/compost pile for three years now and get amazing results. I rarely water them and in the fall I just paw around in there and am able to harvest nearly all the potatoes with my bare hands....no digging. This season I spread woodchips on top of it all. I plan to add more leaves again too.  Oh, and a layer or two of cardboard. Will see how this works out.

Hans, thank you so much. I think your post just convinced me to give potatoes another try. My past efforts have been failures, but you distilled it into principles that seem much more actionable than just imitating somebody who said they were successful.

That depends on the quality of your native soil. When I was researching potatos a few years ago, the Ruth Stout method was all the hype. I've done em in hugelkultur, but I think it would be best done Ruth Stout. HugelKultur is great though if your soil is crap and lacks organic matter.

The perfect potato pile:

  A friend used to rake all her leaves into a pile under an evergreen tree where they were more or less protected from rain.
Once she threw some food scrap that included potato peelings into the pile.
Ever since then she goes out, reaches into the leaves, and pulls out fistfuls of perfect potatoes.
Tree leaves are the gardener's gold.

https://permies.com/wiki/197625/perennial-vegetables/Potatoes