Can I Let Potatoes Grow in the Same Spot Year after Year?

My husband and I are planning to do a sort of "no-dig" potato planting. We dug a small swale/ditch when we moved in (15 feet long, one foot deep and one foot wide), only to find out that the area did not need, nor utilize the swale. So, we figured we'd throw down some fern fronds and leaves, put potatoes on top of that layer, and then add a few feet more of leaves/mulch. What I'm wondering is, can we let potatoes permanently grow in that spot? I often read about the need to rotate potatoes, but I'd much prefer to have a permanent agriculture of potatoes growing there. So much easier! Are there ways to reduce the risks of diseases and lack of productivity that could arise from letting them volunteer and grow in the same place year after year?

Thank you so much!

No, thats very unlikely to work. Traditionally potatoes are on a 3-4 year rotation, to avoid diseases.

sorry Ludger

Disease is something that is usually brought to the site. If you avoid bringing store bought potato waste in compost, it won't spontaneously develop. Nutrient depletion is a risk and can be avoided through regular addition of mulch. I had potatoes growing on the edge of a compost pile for several years. Every spring, the ones that were missed at harvest time, became next year's seed.

In the wild, plants often occupy the same spot for a long time. They rot down in that spot and nutrients are cycled. We take nutrients away at harvest. If plenty of organic waste is returned, the soil is not depleted. Crop rotation has its merits, but it has been practiced during long periods of soil depletion and erosion. Therefore, I think this cornerstone of land stewardship is over rated. It's a response to problems caused by over tillage and mono cropping, in the absence of adequate replenishment of lost nutrients.

If late blight is a problem in your area, I'd be careful: late blight apocalypse
While it takes a lot for it to jump from tomatoes to potatoes,
I was really lucky it hadn't made its way down to the tubers.

I still have 'perennial' potatoes, although it's as much because I've always missed some as anything purposeful
If you try, I suggest finding ancient, unimproved variety(s)-modern cultivars generally get/have viruses that slowly but surely reduce productivity.
Get good at spotting a 'glassy' potato before you bite into one-
they've sprouted and the starches have converted to sugars, they stay hard and inedible when cooked.
If you have generations of potatoes together, you will become familiar!

The other big one is scab but if the soil is acid enough it won't happen. For that reason, you should never lime your potato soil.

I've seen people growing potatoes every year in the same place.........and they tend to use a lot of chemicals like copper sulphate, which is still technically organic, until someone can find an alternative to this cumulative heavy metal, worm killer......for the benefit of people who want to grow potatoes without rotating them much.

An organic seed potato grower told me that he used an 8 year rotation, because volunteers could often spring up 2 or even 3 years later, and presumably the diseases stick around longer.

"If you try, I suggest finding ancient, unimproved variety(s)-modern cultivars generally get/have viruses that slowly but surely reduce productivity. "

Sadly, no. That works for most plants but not potatoes, because potatoes are clones. One gets sick so pretty soon they all do. Most old varieties you are likely to encounter are old clones which people stopped growing because they lost all resistance to disease, and you have little to gain from cloning these old clones. Unless you go to the Andes. Incidentally I'm baffled why so many people think cloning animals is a good idea.

Disease is something that is usually brought to the site. If you avoid bringing store bought potato waste in compost, it won't spontaneously develop.

In the wild, plants often occupy the same spot for a long time. They rot down in that spot and nutrients are cycled. We take nutrients away at harvest. If plenty of organic waste is returned, the soil is not depleted. Crop rotation has its merits, but it has been practiced during long periods of soil depletion and erosion. Therefore, I think this cornerstone of land stewardship is over rated. It's a response to problems caused by over tillage and mono cropping, in the absence of adequate replenishment of lost nutrients.

I burn all potato waste and don't bring any more in. Blight still develops. I think it blows in on the wind. I don't know how long the potatoes had been growing in that hedge. I suspect a year or two at least.

Arable crop rotation, by itself, does very little to improve soil. The only arable crops which are known to put back anything at all are green beans and peas (harvested when fully ripe, legumes generally leave soil with as much nitrogen as there was before they were planted, no more, no less). When a 19th century farmer said that turnips improved soil it was shorthand for saying that they received lots of manure, much of which helped the next crop, they allowed him to feed more animals over winter, which meant more manure, and they were grown in rows which helped with weed control. Holistic thinking. Soils were actually building in this era as far as anyone can tell. The idea that certain arable crops "make" phosphate or magnesium for subsequent crops to use is an urban myth. A few deep rooted annuals such as oil radish are believed to bring up nutrients from deep underground, but deep rooted perennials (such as a hedge at the edge of the field) probably do that far better. Crop rotation may prevent soil becoming unbalanced (evidence for this is hard to come by, I've searched). The strongest argument for rotation is that it prevents pests and disease.

IMO IF you are growing annual plants some kind of rotation is usually good. In the wild, plants do grow in the same spot, but they also spread, die back in areas and cross pollinate over quite large areas and most importantly, they reproduce sexually at least some of the time and thus evolve. I hope one day all our permaculture garden plants can behave like that, but in reality many of us are growing small populations of not very diverse plants in isolated locations. A bed of reeds will be reproducing asexually a lot of the time, but it still produces seeds. No one has DNA tested them every year for a few centuries, but it could be interesting to see exactly what is going on with them. English Elm trees reproduced entirely asexually until Dutch Elm disease virtually wiped them out (what does that tell us?)

IMO the only long term solution to the problem of blight is breeding potatoes which spontaneously produce true seed, so every potato grower becomes a breeder.
For years "potato roguers" have been paid to remove any potatoes which set true seed

I have a story about a potato monocrop that was maintained in one place for many years.

My grandparents liked to eat potatoes. When I was young they would grow about half an acre of potatoes every year in the garden, the harvest in the fall would be enough to fill the box of a half ton truck, they had a good cold room to keep them in and would eat potatoes for at least one meal per day, and have enough left to plant the next years crop.
As a kid when we would go visit them in the summer one of the chores we had to do was to pick the potato bugs off the plants. (these ones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle ). Every plant would have several red larvae of various ages, an average of one patch of eggs, and occasionally an adult. We would squish the eggs and pick off and kill larvae and adults all by hand and usually without gloves. It was a gross horrible chore, even for me who loved to pick up and play with bugs, these were just gross.

I was always found their potatoes to be very sad looking because, my mother also grew potatoes in her garden and they were always 3-4 times the size and the leaves were a darker green, and each plant produced a lot more potatoes.

This happened because my grandparents grew potatoes in over half their vegetable garden space, so there was always places were potatoes were grown in the same spot two years in a row. My grandfather has passed and my grandmother has moved into town. My mother moved there a few years ago, there are no more potato bugs. How was this done? for one year no potatoes were grown, just a variety of other vegetables. The next year; a couple rows of potatoes were planted and carefully monitored for bugs. The year after that potatoes were planted in a different section of the garden and monitored carefully, no bugs were found.

Controlling and eliminating pests is not difficult if annuals are planted in different places every year, this seems to be something permies have a pretty good handle on anyway. I probably didn't need to share this story here.

I missed a few potatoes last summer, so I got a fall crop without replanting. The fall potatoes produced more per plant.

A couple years ago, I missed a couple fall potatoes and they were my best summer potatoes. Nature is apparently better at raising potatoes than I am.

There are two different problems involved in growing potatoes year on year: what happens to the soil and what happens to the potatoes.

Soil:

You have the obvious problem of nutrient depletion, but this can be solved by fertilization and some soils will have more reserve and take longer to deplete than others.  The worse problem is that bacterial and fungal diseases and invertebrate pests will accumulate where potatoes are grown repeatedly.  Most of the fungal diseases will not overwinter successfully without a host, but some will.  Bacterial diseases like scab get worse and worse as their populations build in the soil and it takes a break of several years to reduce the population.

Potatoes:

It is the potato tubers that are the major reserve of disease.  It is hard to get them all when you harvest, so you usually end up with some volunteers.  These volunteers keep bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases alive through the winter to infect the next crop.  If you can get all of the volunteers before you plant a new crop, that significantly reduces the problems of growing in the same ground, but this is a lot of work and requires major soil disruption.

The biggest long term problem is replanting the same tubers.  They will accumulate several very common potato viruses which are aphid transmitted and the problem will get worse and worse.  Once you have viruses in the population, they will quickly infect even new, clean potatoes that you bring in.  You can live with viruses, but they depress yields, often significantly once you accumulate more than one type.  The best way to avoid this is to fully harvest your potatoes, eat them all, and plant certified seed each year.  Even certified seed is not really virus free, but the prevalence is low enough that the viruses don't become a problem in that year.

If you don't want to be involved in that system of high tech middle-men, then you need to be very attentive to roguing out plants that show any sign of disease and selecting varieties that perform best in your area over multiple years.  If you are really serious about growing potatoes, even better would be to breed potatoes for your conditions, growing from seed and keeping the ones that show the best disease resistance.  Until about 100 years ago, before the advent of virus testing and micropropagation, this is how cultivars were maintained.  New varieties were grown from seed and abandoned when they "ran out" due to accumulation of diseases.

It is amusing to read accounts of potato introductions from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They go something like:

First year: New potato "Farmer John's Wonder" grown from seed ball.
Third year: Farmer John's Wonder now available in quantity!
Fourth year: Farmer John's Wonder - best potato yield we've ever seen.
Seventh year: Farmer John's Wonder just doesn't perform like it used to.  Yields are poor.
Eighth year: "Farmer Bob's Mortgage Lifter" grown from seed ball.
Eleventh year: "Farmer Bob's Mortgage Lifter" - best potato yield we've ever seen.

Etc.

Most potatoes run out pretty fast, especially if you are growing them where you already have active virus infection.  Still, you can often get a solid 3-4 years from seed grown varieties before you retire them.

The man who does Back to Eden gardening has potatoes in the same spot continuously. He uses deep woodchip mulch. He harvests by hand and replaces the largest potato in the hole for the next crop as he harvests. That's all he does except schlep in the woodchip.

Dean Brown wrote:The man who does Back to Eden gardening has potatoes in the same spot continuously. He uses deep woodchip mulch. He harvests by hand and replaces the largest potato in the hole for the next crop as he harvests. That's all he does except schlep in the woodchip.

Deep, or thick, mulch?
In what climate?

What I specifically like about YouTube gardeners, is real time (wait a season) feedback from other gardener/subscribers on the methods people tout. Here's someone trying the Back to Eden method. The lady is not replanting immediately but that is the original practice. Right back in the same spot. I love the simplicity of it.



Basically, people lay potatoes on the soil. Add 8 inches of woodchip. Rest. Harvest as above but put the best one back.

I'm more inclined to lay out compost, maybe minerals, then potatoes, then woodchip, as I'm currently doing. The first application of woodchip, though very beneficial, takes some time to start breaking down and making it's own compost/minerals.

There are places all over my section I can get my spade into now, woodchip application was responsible for a lot of that. Mulch mowing built some good topsoil for me after a decade, woodchip only took a year or two according to location and chicken involvement. I had some very bad ground, it's turned around. I strongly suspect that fungi are performing much of the magic in these rapid soil healing processes as well; and time required is a factor sped up by deep mulching of planted areas.

Remember potatoes are a member of the Solanaceae family with tomatoes, eggplant (aubergine), capsicum, etc. So, theoretically, they shouldn't be planted in the same bed year after year to avoid disease, but also nutrient depletion.

The idea being to keep the focus on the soil biota because benefits in quality produce will follow.

So, yes, they can be planted in the same bed each year but it's not recommended to maintain ongoing quality.

One caveat though; disease and nutrient depletion can be reduced by intensive farming practices like continually working the plot throughout 12 months - no fallow. That usually takes a LOT of work, life usually gets in the way and good intentions slide.

Crop rotation has a proven track record of maximising production, maintaining soil quality, with the least amount of work.

Crop rotation is not easy everywhere.... like when you have to take into account sun exposure, protection from the wind...
Of course when you have a large flat garden allowing you to plant anything anywhere you like, you can rotate more easily!

I'm aware of the 'need' for crop rotation with Solanaceae, but is it as necessary as we are told. Are blight and other tomato diseases symptomatic of tilling methods allowing compaction and oomycete pressure that comes with that? It seems unnatural to me that a large portion of our annual crops require rotation due to build up of disease. It seems natural that nutrient depletion from monoculture may be responsible for weakening of plants and the rise of disease that way.

Pathogen propagule numbers are obviously enhanced in the presence of their host plants but if organisms antagonistic to those pathogens were also present it may be we don't have to pamper solanums nearly so much as we've been led to believe.

Here's another set, forget, reset method. And again, some random amateurs succeeding with it. This one is the Ruth Stout method.

In my experience, potato issues can show up as soon as the third year of growing in the same spot.  Now keep in mind that this was my father who went through a gardening phase but was doing it really low-maintainance.  Because of that I am only willing to grow potatoes in the same pot or the same spot 2 years in a row at most.  But if you're willing to put in lots of work it sounds like, under the right conditions, you might be able to get them to last longer.  I don't see myself being that person though, so I'll stick with only one or two years and then switch.

I am on a 3 year rotation.   I have replanted in the same location for a second crop in the same year.