This summer (it’s almost here!) I’m determined to grow a late crop of spuds. We’re gradually digging up our main crop at the moment, and while I can vouch for the fact that they’re absolutely delicious, I know from experience that supplies will dwindle quite fast in the next month or two. Yep, we’re a potato family!
My plan is to plant a second crop in late February. This means that if the weather is kind, the spuds will be ready for harvest in late May or early June, when they can be dug and stored in a cool shed for use throughout winter. Rather than buy in new seed potatoes, I’m going to use healthy spuds from my previous crop. There’s nothing really revolutionary about such a plan. People have been doing it for centuries, but for a smallholder like me, it’s athe next step along a path toward having a regular, non-supermarket food supply all year round. After all, it’s one thing to be self-sufficient in summer. Winter is a trickier beast altogether.
When it comes to the actual growing, I have to confess to being fairly traditional in my methods. In the past I’ve tried no dig methods, and had pretty good success, but I prefer to grow potatoes in the ground. The fattening tubers are excellent at breaking up heavy soil and becuase the plants are so thirsty (daily watering is essential during hot weather), I find soil grown potatoes easier to water. Here’s my method, in a few simple steps (pics are from late winter).
1. Prepare the potato bed in advance. Spuds are quite hungry plants, so I dig the ground roughly, and add lashings of home made compost, a generous handful per square metre of pelletised chook manure, the same of blood and bone, and this year, a double handful of biochar. I work the lot together with my late Pa’s antique garden fork. Potatoes like a slightly acid soil, so I don’t add any lime. Once the soil is levelled with a rake, I give the bed a deep soak, and allow everything to settle for a week or so.
2. To plant the seed potatoes, I dig shallow trenches about 20cm deep. The potatoes get placed in the bottom of the trench, always with an eye facing up. Those that have started to sprout in storage or that have been deliberately chitted, are placed with the shoots pointing toward the light. Some people rub off all but one or two shoots, arguing that the potatoes will be larger. I leave all the shoots on, hoping for smaller, but more plentiful spuds. The seed potatoes are spaced at about 20-30cm, and the rows are spaced about the same distance apart. You can go for wider spacings, but at this distance I manage to fit in two 1kg bags of seed potatoes. If you have more space, you can cut the seed potatoes in half to make them go further – as long as they have an eye or two they’ll be fine. As for varieties, there are loads to chose from. This year I planted Lustre, Pink Eye, Dutch Cream and Red Norland – a flour potato for baking, a waxy for salads, a cream for mash, and a red because I like the look of red skin! They all came from the Lost Seed Company, previously based in Tassie but now in NSW. Other suppliers include the Diggers Club, Green Harvest, Tasmanian Gourmet Potatoes and more.
3. Label the different varieties (I use eco-friendly bamboo labels), cover the seed potatoes with soil, and give the bed another deep soaking. Unless the weather is very dry, I don’t water again until the first haulms (shoots) start appearing through the surface of the soil. In past years I’ve mulched as the haulms appear, but this year I’ve left the soil surface bare. Suffice to say, it’s my best crop ever! One of the problems with heavy mulching is that it can be difficult to get water right down to the roots of the plant. One year I used a “water fork” to get moisture down to the rootzone. This ended up spearing, and ruining, lots of spuds. With bare soil I’m able to easily the bed a deep soak during dry weather, and because the spuds are sown thickly, the plants shade out any weeds.
4. After about 10-12 weeks, the spuds are ready for harvest. You can bandicoot a few small “new” potatoes earlier than this, and for fat monster your can leave the crop grow for longer. Once the haulms start to wither and die (often they’ll flower first), it’s time to either dig the whole lot up at once, or progressively harvest the potatoes as you need them. This is my Mum digging a crop of Desiree spuds back in 2008. We dug the lot, set the skins by laying them out in the sun for a day (after about 48 hours in the light the skins will turn green and make the spuds poisonous), then stored them in hessian sacks in a cool shed. This is what I plan to do with my late crop.
A single bed like the one in the photos, about 2 metres squared, will produce around 20kg of potatoes, if not more. I usually have room to grow 4 square metres worth, so that’s a decent crop of potatoes, enough to last my family for as much as 20 weeks. Home grown potatoes are superb, a true wonder of the edible plant world. Mashed, boiled, baked or fried, they’re my favourite veg of all time!
Your spuds look fantastic. I wonder if you can point me to a website or whatever for some info please. We have a lot of land and we want to do a vegetable garden.
We’re both middle aged with not-so-good backs so we will probably do some sort of raised set up.
We have good quality soil that we will build up further with compost and manure, but the ‘weeds’ or native grasses or whatever are overwhelming. Is there any way of using our soil but dealing with the weeds apart from heavy duty, constant weeding?
The easiest way to stop weeds invading garden beds, Christine, is simply to keep bare soil covered. Plant cover will stop most weed seeds from germinating, but where some soil is still exposed, a layer of sugarcane, lucerne or straw about 10cm deep is generally enough to do the trick. I use mulch selectively in the vegie patch. In early spring I often leave the soil bare, so that the sun can warm it up. As the weather warms up, I generally throw down some mulch to lock in moisture and keep beds cool.
The other great thing about mulch is that it slowly breaks down to improve the texture of your soil. Sometimes I even dig half rotted mulch into the soil to accelerate the process, though I wouldn’t do that with anything woody. If you’re preparing new garden beds, it’s a good idea to put down a layer of cardboard or newspaper to stop perennial grasses and weeds growing back through the mulch. Kikuyu – the main grass in my area, is notoriously invasive, and some sort of physical barrier or manual removal will be necessary to keep it at bay. I don’t always have the time for that, so about once per year, I selectively, and very reluctantly, spray with glyphosate to prevent the kiuyu from running amok. If someone ever brings out an organic product capable of controlling kikuyu, I’ll be using that.
Regarding raised beds, you can see from the photos that my beds are one sleeper (200mm) high. If you are using sleepers or another form of support you can go as high as you like, though it takes a surprising amount of soil to fill the beds. The other way to go is a no dig raised bed made from layers of straw and compost. This will shrink a bit as it breaks down but can be continually topped up with more layers. Or, you can simply form raised beds with soil in a path-bed-path-bed arrangement.
I’ve done the lot. Raised beds, no-dig beds, and beds at ground level. The most convenient I’ve found is my current system of low, 200mm raised beds. They’re low eneough that you can get in and have a dig, contain the soil well, assist with drainage (thank goodness I had them last summer!) and make the vegie garden an attractive space in its own right. Everyone’s different though, so what works for me might not work for you. Why not try a couple of different configurations in the one space? Come to think of it, most gardens I’ve visited use a combination of raised beds, ground level beds and pots anyway, so why not try them all and see what works best.
Thanks Justin. I am getting very seduced by the idea of self wicking garden beds. I reckon you could do it in old bathtubs. I suspect that I could get some thru the local freecycle. That way we would not have to set up watering systems, as we spend time in town also. We have lots of water, but I worry about a watering system failing or something going wrong and our enormous tank getting emptied out.
To be honest, Christine, I’ve got mixed feelings about wicking beds. They have some obvious advantages over traditional raised beds, but some downsides as well. My preference is for beds made from real soil (not garden mix from a landscape suppliers), combined with continual additions of compost. Soil rich in organic matter holds moisture like sponge and gradually feeds it to plants. In your situation though, wicking beds could prove very worthwhile. I guess you’d just need to top them up each time you visit your property. Old bathtubs could make a for nice rustic style garden as well.
Thanks Justin, I just did a real hack job of this a few weeks ago as an experiment… just planted a few potatoes that had been at the bottom of the basket a little too long… And I had no idea what I was looking for in the plants, or even how to harvest and when. So thanks for being so generous with your knowledge and experience! I feel like I might just be able to wing it this time. Who knows what I’ll dig up? But at least we’ve got healthy surface plants at the moment… grace
It’s worth a go Grace. Dig them up in a few months and you might be in for a nice suprise.
So you don’t hill your plants as they grow, or mulch around them at all?
BTW, I’m insanely jealous of your soil! We have clay pan on rock here, so everything has to be raised beds, and intensively improved. After four years of work I can now put a garden fork a couple of inches into the clay under my raised beds.
Keep working on that soil Melinda and it will get better and better with each passing season. You’re probably already doing this, but regular applications of gypsum will help break up the clay. Rock minerals help as well, as will regular green manure crops. It takes time but good soil can be built.
When we built our vegie garden five years ago we used some site soil, and imported some from nearby that has a similar texture. It’s volcanic soil that drains well, but sets like a rock when dry, so we added lots of compost, goose and horse manure intially, and have continually added organic matter ever since. It’s gradually becoming dark and friable. This year I’ve been using biochar, which seems to be working well, and I swear by green manures. Will do a post about them in the future.
In the past I’ve tried a range of approaches with the potatoes. I’ve hilled them up, applied ever thicker layers of mulch as the haulms grow and so on, but this summer, I’ve simply left the soil bare and done no hilling or mulching. I’ve got a bumper crop!
Part of my thinking is that spring is our driest, windiest time of the year. True to form, late October and early November were hot (most days around 30C), windy, and absolutely bone dry. The plants shade the soil below, keeping it cool and moist and preventing weed growth, and the bare ground makes for easy watering. With thick layers of mulch it’s hard to get water down to the rootzone of the plant, and potatoes can be very thirsty. Depending on your climate, mulching might be more or less beneficial than it is here.
Hilling can increase yields, but I space the plants too close to make it practical and to be honest, I can’t be bothered – there’s always more than enough to be done in spring.