Today is St. Patrick’s day.
That’s the traditional day for planting potatoes, in this climate.
But my new raised beds aren’t ready yet. And the old ones are a weedy mess. Which I didn’t much feel like hoeing out of the way, this rainy St. Patrick’s day morning.
So I planted this year’s potatoes as no-dig (no-till) potatoes. I placed them on top of an existing weedy garden bed, and buried them under half-a-foot of free leaf mulch.
Edit 7/23/2023: Near-total failure. See Post G23-041.
Gardening doesn’t get much easier, or much cheaper, than that.
Details follow.
This is what works for me.
- Bought grocery-store organic potatoes.
- Chitted (sprouted) starting 2/1/2023.
- Cut the larger ones into halves, and left them a day to “scab over”.
- Placed on top of an un-weeded garden bed.
- Buried with half-a-foot of leaf compost.
I don’t use “seed potatoes”, that is, potatoes specifically sold for planting. I had back luck with that, the first year I tried growing potatoes, and I’ve never looked back.
Instead, I plant ordinary grocery-store potatoes. The only caveat is that they have to be labeled as “organic”. (Around here, for whatever reason, Whole Foods is the only grocery store with bags of full-sized organic potatoes.)
There’s a sound practical reason for choosing “organic” in this case. That “organic” label means they should not have been sprayed with the powerful sprout inhibitor that frequently causes grocery-store potatoes to fail to grow (Post G22-004).
I set these potatoes out to chit circa February 1 (post G23-002). In theory, chitting gives you a head start on growing your potatoes. But the main purpose from my perspective is to show that the potatoes will, in fact, sprout.
Its a belt-and-suspenders approach. I buy potatoes labeled as organic, because they should grow just fine. And I chit (sprout) them, to make sure they will start growing.
The reason for this caution is that, at this time of year, it typically takes close to a month for the potato sprouts to emerge. If you manage to plant dud potatoes –as I did, the first year I tried growing potatoes — that means it’ll be a month from now before you realize you’re not seeing any nice green potato sprouts. At which point, you can start over.
In any case, all three varieties that I’m growing (red, gold, russet) put out nice, fat, short sprouts in response to room temperatures and some indirect sunlight. So they were good to go.
The only problem is that I hadn’t prepared a garden bed for them. I’d let my existing temporary ones go to weeds, as I am in the process of replacing them. And I didn’t much feel like hoeing down the weeds on a raised bed on this rainy March morning.
I opted for no-dig potatoes again this year. I had done that in the past and gotten excellent results. Just place your potatoes on the ground and bury them with a foot or so of straw. They’ll root into the dirt, but produce their new potatoes above ground, in the nice, clean straw. This makes them not just easy to plant, but easy to harvest as well.
But this year, I have no straw, and had nowhere nearby where I could buy a few bales at this time. Plus, I wasn’t all that keen on straw anyway, as the cost of straw bales in this area exceeds the value of the potatoes that would be produced. That’s exactly the sort of value-destroying gardening that I try to avoid (Post #1073).
Then I read that you could use almost anything for no-dig potatoes, including leaf mulch. My county provides a high-quality “free” (i.e., prepaid by tax dollars) leaf compost, available for pickup at my nearby solid-waste transfer station. Free is definitely a price I can live with, even if I have to make a few car trips to get it.
The upshot is that I placed the sprouted, cut potatoes on top of the weedy old garden bed, and buried the whole thing under half-a-foot of composted leaf mulch.
That’s it. No hoeing, no weeding, no digging. I’ll be on the lookout for any signs of nitrogen deficiency, as sometime all that brown matter can lock up all the available nitrogen in the soil as it decomposes. Maybe I’ll test the soil to make sure nothing else is lacking. Otherwise, other than watering them if necessary, that’s all the effort I’m putting in until it’s time to harvest.
