 Hi there and welcome to my channel. So it is a beautiful spring evening here on the Saskatchewan Prairies and I'm very excited to be planting tonight one of my three favorite vegetables that I love growing in the garden and that is potatoes. I like to grow potatoes under straw and I like to grow potatoes in containers using straw as well. So here is my straw bed that I've been using for about the last three years to grow potatoes and in this video I will show you how I plant under straw on the ground also in containers. So let's get going. So I have four kinds of potatoes here that I'm going to be planting up today. One kind here is the French fingerling. These are kind of a smaller potato. I got the red norlands, the Russet Burbank and the Yukon Gold. So I'm going to just leave them whole. I'm not going to cut them up into smaller pieces and as you can see they've got some really good sprouts coming on them so these are ready to go into the ground. So the straw that I have been using to grow my potatoes in is pea straw. We happen to have access to a few bales of pea straw that the cattle didn't care for. They're a couple years old, these bales, so they really make a good mulch here for my garden. So the first year that I tried growing potatoes using this method, which is well known as the Russet Stout method, I used hay and I found that the hay has so many different weeds and grasses and all sorts of seeds in it that it brought more weeds to my garden than I really wanted. So I switched to the straw a few years ago. So when I first set this up there was just bare dirt here. We had actually a lot of these trees you see here were growing in this space here and Preston and I chopped down about six or seven trees and the ground was just nice forest floor type soil that was already full of all sorts of great material and so I just started laying out the straw and planting my potatoes. So this is my third year using the straw here and I just want to show you what the soil looks like underneath. So as this straw breaks down also get a lot of leaves dropping off the trees here which break down. If you just get down here into the soil you can see there's some really nice stuff here. So this is where the potatoes will be laying. We'll cover them up with a layer of straw. There's no digging required and hopefully we can get some rain and very little maintenance is required on these potatoes. So sadly Jax has to stay tied up while I am planting potatoes today but he is going to just enjoy watching me from afar and so I'm going to get started by just pulling back the hay with a rake just exposing the dirt and making my rows as straight as possible. I'm not really too finicky about straight rows and then I'm just laying out these potatoes about 12 inches apart from each other. I try to turn the roots upwards so that they are or the sprouts I mean upwards so that they are growing in the right direction to start off. Then once I've got them spaced out I just pull the hay or the straw back over top and that is about all we need to do for now. So one of the other benefits of this method is you know there's very little weeding required and hopefully very little watering. Whenever I see you know pieces of quack grass popping up I simply just go grab some more straw and just throw it over top and just keep it smothered. So any little stick, plastic stick or wood stick or steel I just use as my markers and I believe I got about eight rows here of the three different kinds of potatoes planted and about 16 to 18 potatoes in each row. So hopefully if I have good successful germination of all these potatoes I should have about 120 to 130 hills of potatoes here. So I'm going to be planting the french fingerlings in containers today under straw and I'm very excited to have a little helper with me today. Hi, coming to help me here. So this is my grandson Henderson. He is 15 months old and this is his first time helping out in Jima's garden. You ready to plant potatoes? Let's see. Here, we'll set that in the dirt. You put it in the container, put it in the container. I'll show you how it's done, okay? See the potato here? It goes in here. Take it in the ground, the dirt and over here, leave them there. No, you put it in here. You're worse than a dog. I think five's enough. We're going to cover them up with straw. So Henderson and I got three of these containers set up with about six potatoes in each of them and I'm also going to do up this smaller cloth bag that I found. Half full of soil right now. I put five in here and I also should mention I did add some blood meal to the soil as well. So I have a couple of videos from last year that I made a more in-depth one on growing potatoes under straw in containers, plus I did a follow-up video of the harvest. So I will link those two videos in the description box below. Be sure to check them out as well. So you can see the dog is interested in what I'm doing here. This is why I need to keep him chained up while I'm trying to plant things otherwise he's going to dig them up. So using this method is also good just to save on potting soil and dirt if you don't have a lot. You can just half fill your containers with some kind of soil and I have you know several inches of soil. You don't even need that much. So instead of having to cover up the potatoes with a lot more soil, the straw works great. The potatoes will work their way up through the straw and you can even hill them up even more with straw if you need to as they start popping through. So I will be sure to keep you updated throughout the summer on the progress of my potatoes that I have growing here under straw. If you enjoyed watching this video, please give it a thumbs up, leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching.