Favorite easy ways to make garden beds? Here's mine using mulch and potatoes!

I am interested in the best way to make a garden bed that can be directly planted into. I made 5 Hugelkultur beds in January and I planted into them at the beginning of March but I think they needed more time to ripen. The plants seem to be having trouble getting nutrients and growing roots.
But more importantly I got some soil and want to make a garden bed that I can plant into for this summers growing season. We live on a property that is primarily sand under a pine forest. Do I need to put some type of liner down?
We have chickens and a lot of wood material and dried leaves. If I do a lasagna style bed could I plant directly into it?

What are you wanting to plant? That matters, because carrots, for example, need deeper soil than beans. You can build a garden over sand, no need to create any liner. Basically you need to look at the root structure of each type of plant to see what it needs for depth and breadth of growing area, then add 20% to that. For lasagna gardening, if you have even 3” of soil on top there’s quite a few things you can grow while the substructure is composting. Realize that hugelkultur is not so much a type of garden as it is a way to make soil. So the first couple years you can grow some things, but overall it a soil building process early on. As you likely know, chicken manure is ‘hot’, meaning high nitrogen, so the wood chips and leaves are a perfect way to balance that out, but still not something you can plant directly into. However, it makes an awesome compost mulch to add on top of the soil once your plants are up and growing well.
I’m sure others will chime in with more ideas for you! I know how frustrating it is to want to get growing and not have the right setup yet! I’ve learned to just ‘do what I can do’ and keep doing it.

I know this is meant to be totally low-effort, but would this method work with transplanted TPS (True potato seeds) seedlings?

Looking at the OP, I confess I am envious. You can achieve things in a year, and see the results. In my cold climate, with garden beds and composters frozen solid for six months, these are 3-year projects.

I am glad I saw this thread.  My property is sloped and I have been back filling the lower areas mostly with wood chips but I have scattered sandy top soil and old broken down horse manure in the area when I have that available.  I was going to let them compost down a couple years but I think I will try planting potatoes and garlic in these areas.

Thank you for the information.

Grow report from this year: No maintenance, lots of potatoes!

I gotta say, I'm seriously thankful for this method. We've had a really weird year here in the Pacific Northwest. It was cold and rainy, like late-winter weather--all the way up until July 4th. Then it turned hot and dry. It's mid-October, and our weather is still summer like, and it still hasn't rained.

BUT! My potatoes did great! In early March, I mowed/cut where I wanted to plant potatoes, scraped down to the dirt where I was actually putting a potato and used the dirt to cover the potato. Then I covered with duck bedding. I added more bedding and some grass clippings as the summer went on. I never watered.

Since this was so easy to do--and I had bought (as usual) too many potatoes, and had too many potatoes sprouting up from last years' potatoes--I ended up planting maybe 80 sqft of potatoes, scattered around fruit trees and at the edge of the lawn, as well as in devoted garden beds. I've been going out and harvesting 1 pound of potatoes at least once a week since August, and there's still more potatoes out there.

Places where the potatoes didn't do as well:

 ~ Where I used too much grass as mulch
 ~ Where there was a bit too much shade

But, I'm all in all very pleased by the amount of calories (and nutrients) that I'm getting out of the garden, especially with how little work it was. So many things didn't grow well this year with the crazy weather, but these potatoes sure did!

What a great thread!  I am about to move into a new house and have some land again, and I was immediately attracted to this thread.  I had read about this method elsewhere in the last day or two, and it's great to hear other peoples' results using it.

I'm hoping to get wood chips before winter and start some new beds that way.  Up in Zone 5b in the Hudson Valley (NY), they may not get too much done over the winter, but at least it's a head start in the spring.  It's a blank slate - a little less than an acre outside of town, plenty of sun, also some huge pines with great shade.

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

It's Christmas Day (my husband is working, so we celebrated a few days ago). I thought it might be nice to have some mashed potatoes or fries for dinner. So I went to see if I could dig some up!

(Note: It's been a crazy growing year, with a very wet, cold spring that was more like late winter and lasted until July 5th. Then it went to a hot, dry summer with the longest stretch of hot weather we've ever had (and also the most days over 90ºF) we've ever had. Summer weather lasted until late October and then it turned to winter. We've already had two big snow events (with 8+ inches of snow the first time, and 5+ the second snow), and then we got down to 12ºF.)

Despite the very weird weather, and the below-freezing weather, there were still a lot of potatoes to be found! In the below pictures, you can see the disturbed area where I just dug, and the amount of potatoes I got out of it. Not too shabby, especially for how little effort I put into growing it. I just put duck bedding and some lawn clippings on them, and left them alone. The mulch made it easy to dig them up, even with the ground soggy.



Now to go make some fries!

Saw this technique on YT and had to check to see if it was permies approved.

Thanks so much for your detailed post Nicole! And to all who chimed in.

Hope to play with this technique in '26, much obliged!

Hayley Stewart wrote:I know this is meant to be totally low-effort, but would this method work with transplanted TPS (True potato seeds) seedlings?

Sorry it's five years later with no reply -- I'm just seeing this great thread for the first time. It'll work fine, but you'd want them to be pretty well developed before transplanting so they don't get lost in the mulch. And don't ever expect a bumper crop your first year. I grow TPS on year one just to get tubers to plant the following spring and occasionally I'm surprised by getting enough to eat.

In Twenty First Century Hoe Farming, the author, discussing how to start a vegetable field writes:

In the first year, it is advisable to plant the field with potatoes to clear it of weeds. If the field has been left untended for a long time, it will have well-established weed roots in the soil, and it is best to tackle only part of the field at time. Grow potatoes in part of the field in the first year and grow vegetables in this area in the second...

It's not an exact similitude but I just read that the other night and then saw this thread and they connected in my head. He has you breaking new ground using potatoes to prepare the ground for growing vegetables later.