 Hi, I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute and today I'm going to talk about how to plant potatoes, the best methods based on a USDA funded study we did with market gardeners here in southern Wisconsin. I get asked about potatoes all the time because I talk about potatoes all the time. I argue that they're one of the most important foods for locally self-sufficient communities as fossil fuels become less available. Or maybe you're having economic hardships like we all are with food prices right now and you want to grow more of your own potatoes. This video is especially for you guys. So today I'm going to show two methods of growing potatoes and why I recommend one or the other. If you want to read all about our research on potatoes go to lowtechinstitute.org slash research and click on the potato study and you can see there are results growing five different methods and why I'm recommending what I do. Today I'm going to be talking about two methods, both of which can be used in established beds like this or if you're colonizing a lawn to make more garden space I'm going to recommend one of the methods for that but we'll start with traditional trench and hill. Trench and hill is probably how you've planted potatoes before seeing potatoes planted basically it means digging a trench, putting the potatoes in the bottom, putting compost on top of them, filling them back up and then as they grow through the season you hill them up. This method's fine but it is not what I'm going to recommend today. Trench and hill is a lot of work and I'm lazy that's why I don't do it. For both methods, both trench and hill and surface planting which is the second one I'll talk about I'm doing rows that are about three feet, two and a half, three feet apart and the potatoes are all spaced out of foot that stays the same no matter what method I'm doing so for trench and hill basically what I'm doing is digging a four to six inch deep trench setting the soil next to it I'll take my seed potatoes and I'll put them in one at a time I use my foot as a planting gauge to give me a foot then each potato gets about a quart of compost and then it gets buried back up as the plants emerge then I would hoe all the weeds and everything that's growing between the rows I would hoe that back up and cover these over this is the traditional way of growing potatoes I'm not recommending this this takes twice as much work per pound of yield in our trials we found that for every pound of potatoes you get out of here you have to work twice as much as the next method I'm going to show you this method also produces a little bit more than the next method I'm going to show you about 25% so if your space is very finite very limited and you want to grow as many potatoes as you can in a finite space then I guess this method but you're going to be working twice as hard to get it what I'd recommend if you have the space just plant a little bit more of the next method and get the potatoes for half the work okay now let's look at method two and method two requires cardboard as much cardboard as you can get and if you are in a city or a place where you can go to an appliance store and get refrigerator boxes that's the best stuff I've found because there are big boxes they don't have glossy printing on them which can put leach chemicals into your soil they don't have staples which don't degrade and they usually stick into your boot or your foot and they don't have they don't have a tape which will not biodegrade and will end up in your soil and you have to dig it out the next year so this method relies on cardboard as a weed barrier and you could certainly use this with trench and hill you could put down cardboard and reduce the amount of weeding you have to do but then it's hard to hill because you don't have access to the soil so this method works either on established beds like this one or if you're colonizing a lawn to turn it into a garden this works well and I'll talk about the differences so in an established bed like this what I want to do is make rows of cardboard between my rows of potatoes my potato rows are going to be here here and there so I want to put down cardboard here and here now if you're experienced lasagna gardener meaning you use cardboard as a weed barrier often you might be noticing that I'm not overlapping these if I were on a lawn I would want to make sure that there is no space where the grass comes up I just raked this down but if I was on a lawn I would mow it as low as I possibly can and then mow it again as low as that mower will go and then I would put down cardboard just like this except on a lawn I would cover these up and have at least three or four inches of overlap and then I would do another layer I would do two layers of cardboard on grass here I can get away with just putting it in the rows between the potatoes and then I'm gonna plant the potatoes in the exposed soil here this is just a weed barrier it's such a good weird weed barrier that I probably won't have to weed for most of the season excuse me while I run and get a little more cardboard my cardboard is half composted already I would maybe consider another a layer because it's so composted might not hold the weeds back as well I'd like now as you can see I've got two rows of cardboard and here's where I'll plant and here's where I'll plant and there's where I'll plant if this were just an open field not raised beds I would just do this over and over and over cardboard cardboard cardboard at three-foot spacings now I can plant my potatoes right on top of the soil so much easier these are red norlands in case you're curious if I were planting on a lawn and this were and there was no soil to plant in I would still plant at three-foot spacings with one foot between each potato and then I would just plant right on top of the cardboard and today I can probably get away with one court maybe two courts of compost and then maybe another court partway through the growing season if I'm planting just on top of the cardboard to colonize a lawn then I would probably give them two courts of compost now and another court partway through the season best part about this method is the harvest at harvest time instead of having to dig up all those potatoes that I trenched in these will be right on the surface all I have to do is pull back the rotted cardboard and pull the potatoes out alright so now that they are covered in compost now I'm gonna put straw or mulch on them I don't want to put wood chips on them wood chips draw nitrogen out of their environment to decompose and so I want to put straw or some other kind of grassy type mulch on top of this another reason that straw is good is it keeps the soil temperature low by keeping the soil temperature low these are going to reproduce better because potatoes stop producing when the soil temperature gets above 80 85 degrees so I want to keep that nice and cool another thing that the mulch does unlike the trenching hill it holds in moisture it's just all around a better way to do it do not skimp on this it helps keep the potatoes from turning green also if you have to buy straw bales make sure it's clean of pesticides and all that and herbicides and all that and then make sure that you wet it down really nice before you put it on I would use a whole bale for this bed which is 20 feet and it's three rows now you can see me walking on this and I'm compressing it I don't care because it's not going to be grown on this year I'm actually trying to inhibit growth here so now what I'm gonna do is add wood chips here on the cardboard and that'll help keep the cardboard down keeps moisture in the soil helps suppress weeds also usually I chit these potatoes or let them pre-sprout I didn't this year because I'm doing this early this is the first bed I'm doing I'm doing a little earlier than I usually would to make this video so that hopefully it gets to you in time for you to plant potatoes this season now I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this research was funded by the USDA sustainable agriculture research education grant a SAIR grant and that grant ran up in 2018 so now things like this this video is something that we do to try and get our information and useful helpful tips out to the public and that takes staff resources to do so if you're in a position to help us out please head over to patreon it's patreon.com slash low-tech Institute and throw us a couple of bucks subscription start as low as $3 a month and that really helps us defray the cost of our staff time to put out videos like this the more donations and help we get from folks like you the more videos we can put out this is chaff from last week last year's wheat harvest and if you want to learn about growing your own wheat we're having a class later this summer on growing your own wheat if you go to our website you can sign up for our listserv and you'll be told about classes before they happen and how you can sign up wheat prices will be going up this fall and that's probably going to be the topic of our next podcast so again if you're not subscribed to our podcast or our YouTube page please subscribe now just look search for the low-tech podcast in your podcast app or on YouTube