This spring I decided to try a section of garden inspired by Charles Dowding's "No Dig" method and Ruth Stout's deep mulch method (March 14, 2023 Gardening Journal).
I had some potatoes from the grocery store that were starting to sprout so those seemed like good potatoes to use for this little experiment. My sister later gave me some of her left over seed potatoes so I have ended up with probably a dozen plants altogether.
As the potatoes grew I hilled them up with hay/cow manure I had collected from the field.
Today, I decided to go ahead and pull a couple of those first ones (the ones from the grocery store potatoes). The plants had pretty much died back and weren't going to grow anymore anyway.
The plants were very easy to pull out and as I started to rummage through the hay, I was delighted when I started finding potatoes!
While some were quite small - perfect for boiling in their jackets - there were a few nice sized ones as well.
There were a couple of little snakes living down in the hay, and a huge fat earthworm. The hay was pretty dry, but I think there was still moisture in the ground under it. I didn't dig down into the dirt to find out for sure though.
And because the potatoes were all up on top of the ground or in the hay, they were very clean...no dirt to wash off. Plus, not a single potato was damaged by a shovel or fork in the process of "digging" them.
I think had we gotten more rain this spring the potatoes would have been much larger, but even so, I'm 100% sold on this method of growing potatoes. I will never plant potatoes in the ground again! Growing them using this method is so much easier!!!
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| 3.428 lbs of potatoes from the garden (I forgot to weigh them before we ate some last night). |