A few weeks ago I alluded to a new potato growing method around here. I promised a post to Anita and then failed to follow through (story of my life right now!). So I thought tonight was as good a night as any.
Last year we planted potatoes in rows and then hilled them in the traditional way. We hauled a lot of compost up from the pile to make it work, and really didn’t hill as well as we should have because it was A LOT of work to hill 100 row feet of potatoes that way.
This year I’m all about finding ways to make the garden less work because, really, I’d rather be horseback riding with Mike than weeding or hilling potatoes. So, with a stroke of inspiration, I decided to dig holes to plant the seed potatoes in. Of course, it turns out that this is a widely know and used idea, but whatever, I thought of it with no help 
Essentially I dug a 12″ deep hole and put a seed potato at the bottom of it and then covered it with about 2″ of dirt. Once the potatoes sprouted and came up 6-9″ I filled in the hole and then started hilling the potatoes with the soil I had dug out. With minimal effort I managed to hill all the potatoes up about 8″ last night. So much easier than last year’s method.
The pictures are of the Desiree row. They’re off to the strongest start, but the rest are close behind. Now I just need to solve my “weedy path” issue. I’ve got an idea there that I’ve started implementing, hopefully it will work as well as this one!
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So in the end, once all the soil is on top that’s going on top for the season, how deep do the potatoes get? I’m trying to figure out how much space they take….
In the end, I’ll probably hill these up close to a foot above ground. So they’ll get 18-20″ of dirt over the original seed potato. Each hole is only about 9″ around. I space my seed potatoes 1′ apart, with the rows just under 2′ apart. But that’s just me. There are a million ways to grow potatoes and most of them are successful
Super clever! That’s how we’re doing our asparagus, actually. Well, our row is more like one giant trench. The individual holes make more sense… we would actually know when one of them hadn’t come up, that way
Mangochild: We’re growing our spuds in a bin, and (so far as we can tell) it’s working really well. It only takes about 4 square feet of space — though you do need 3 different areas if you want to plant every year, as they say you should only plant potatoes every 3 years in the same spot. Drop me a note if you want to know more.
I am definitely trying this method next year….thanks!
I learned from my old Rodale guide to dig down, I try to get down 18″ and slowly backfill the holes as the plants come up … I’ve also heard of growing them in plastic trash cans in straw, but I don’t think the yields are as good.