 Imagine yourself or your family in 2050. Oil has become difficult to extract and so expensive most people can't use it in their daily lives. We spend a lot more time near where we live and have to depend on locally grown food. What would your staples be? Right now globally we depend on corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, soybeans, and sweet potatoes in descending order. Have you ever tried to grow any of these at a scale to feed yourself or your family? I have. And we're talking about why everybody needs to start learning to grow potatoes. This is the Low-Tech Podcast. Hello and welcome. I'm Scott Johnson from the Low-Technology Institute, your host for podcast number 45 on April 1st. But don't be fooled, no April Fool's here. Potatoes are where the future is at. Today I'm coming to you out of the Low-Tech Institute's gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin. Thank you for joining us. This is part two of Talking About Potatoes. Last episode we traced the origin and history of potatoes. This week we'll talk about how to grow them and along the way we'll discuss why I think they're the staple of the future. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at low underscore techno, like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, and subscribe to us on YouTube. You can also check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org, there you can find both for our podcast as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also at the top here I should say some distributors put ads on podcasts. Unless you hear me doing the ad, someone else is making money on that advertising. And while all of our podcast videos and other information are given freely, they take resources to make. If you're in a position to help support this work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page, patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute. If you'd like to sponsor an episode directly, please get in touch with us through our website lowtechinstitute.org. This episode was brought to you by Kate Ingold. Kate is our first Patreon supporter. Thanks Kate. She's also a volunteer here at the Institute, helping us behind the scenes. It's people like Kate that keep us going. Again, all of our information and resources are free and our community supports our staff providing the resources we need to put together our podcast, videos, and research. If you're in a position to support our work, please consider a monthly donation at our Patreon page and thank you very much. Also if you're a regular listener to the podcast, you might notice this sounds a little different. That's because I'm recording this outside in our garden. I hope you can hear all the birds. We're going to start putting our episodes on YouTube in addition to our regular channels in order to reach more people. So if you can head over there and see as well as hear me give the podcast over the course of the growing season, you'll get to see our garden sprout, grow, bloom, and then get taken over by weeds because that happens every year. Today's topic is potatoes. But before we get there, I assume there's going to be some new people watching on YouTube. Welcome. Glad to have you. Let me take a quick second to introduce our organization before we get rolling. The Low Technology Institute was founded in 2016 with three connected ideas. First we're going to either run out or stop using fossil fuels, especially oil in the foreseeable future. Second this is going to have a profound effect on every aspect of our lives as we currently live them. Third we should use the time we have now to future-proof our lives with changes to how we house, clothe, and feed ourselves and our communities. Everything we talk about is small-scale DIY solutions, things you could do in your household or community to make yourself more resilient. These range from solar hot water systems to food preservation, from growing and processing flax into linen or building with local construction materials. If you create a life that could live without fossil fuels in the future, it also helps you weather the storms of today, whether that's a literal storm knocking out the power like happened in Texas last year or a political storm that causes gas and other prices to soar. So while we couch everything we say about the coming future without fossil fuels, most of this advice is helpful today also. So now on to the regularly scheduled show. Last episode we talked about the evolution, domestication, and history of potatoes. If you haven't yet, go check that out. In short, this South American tuber supported huge societies in the Andes before being brought to Europe and after some false starts became an important staple and even fed a revolution. Today we're covering lots of information about planting, harvesting, and storing potatoes and we hope this will be useful for complete beginners. And even if you're an experienced potato grower, maybe you'll pick up some new ideas and what we're recommending comes from the results of our USDA-funded study on the best methods for growing potatoes in a small scale. Maybe we'll make an instructional video about how to grow potatoes for our YouTube channel this spring. Depends if we have time. So if you were to start growing more of your own food, potatoes would have to be the centerpiece of your calories. There's a reason why Matt Damon's character grew potatoes in the movie The Martian. They're excellent to take along if you're going to colonize somewhere new or survive on your own. So let's look at why we're not recommending you go grow the staples we generally rely on today. Corn is the dominant crop today, obviously. And what you see in the fields of Iowa, for example, is field corn. Each kernel is essentially a little chemical packet that gets broken down and turned into sweetener, plastics, fuel, and other products in a factory. Very little of that corn is eaten in any recognizable form. If you were to depend on corn, as might be appropriate in more tropical latitudes, you'd have to change the way you eat. Corn is a hungry crop requiring a lot of fertility. It stores well, but you have to know how to process dried corn to make tortillas, tomales, or other corn products. Unless you grew up with that food way, it might be a big change for you. Wheat is second across the world, but it's hard work. I'm not opposed to hard work, but we're talking about an emergency situation where growing all our own food. We don't have time. Winter wheat takes almost a year to grow. So if you want wheat this summer, it takes know-how and tools. And you should have planted it already last fall. We harvest our own wheat and each year we get better, but the learning curve is pretty steep. We'll actually have a class on growing, harvesting, processing your own wheat this summer. Check out our website, lowtechinstitute.org, slash events for that. Once wheat is harvested though, it has to be threshed. And this is a job that used to take farmers all winter. Then it has to be ground, which takes a few more hours each day, plus equipment, plus know-how. Only then do you have flour. Rice, especially dryland rice, would be a really fun addition and easier to process and cook than corn or wheat. But the learning curve to grow in North America is steep. And while maybe in the South you have access to that, dryland rice in the North is still an emerging crop. Let's contrast that with potatoes. They grow in marginal plots, meaning not the choice of soils. They benefit from compost, but they're pretty flexible. They also are easy to plant, maintain, harvest, store, and prepare. Corn, wheat, or rice, they're all very difficult. Potatoes are also great colonizers. Since they'll grow in poor soil, I like to use them to clear off new garden beds converting lawn or other land into next year's vegetable gardens. So now let's take a look at how I would recommend you started growing them on a large scale. Let's assume you're starting from a lawn and want to grow potatoes. Since lawn grass is the biggest crop in the country, even more than corn, you should be able to find some space to liberate, to grow food. Here's how I would start. First, you'll need seed potatoes. Potatoes grow from both their tubers and seeds produced in pods. Most gardeners grow from tubers because it's easier. You get a clone of the plant before. If you want to learn more about growing from seeds, check out the Kenosha Potato Project, which I'll link in the show notes. This is a really great community of potato growers and experimenters. If you're starting out, I recommend buying your first seed potatoes. You don't know what diseases would come in from grocery store potatoes, plus those are bread for mechanical planting and harvesting, not flavor. Pick varieties you like to eat. For example, we grow Kennebec for baking potatoes, Norlin Red for lefse, German Fingerlings for potato salads, Oneida Gold and Superior for mash and other uses. And after the first year, we save our clean, good-looking tubers, as well as those that have turned green for the next year's seeds. Seed potatoes should be the bigger than a golf ball, preferably twice that. The larger the tuber a plant has to start with, the better it seems to do. Big seed potatoes are sometimes larger than a golf ball, or larger than a baseball, and they can be cut as long as each section has an eye from which the plant will grow. Just let the fresh cut scab over and dry before you plant it. I take my seed potatoes and I chip them. This isn't necessary, but it's basically pre-sprouting them by setting them in egg crates or other flat containers in the sun in my house. And then the plants start to emerge from the eyes, and then I can plant them. Now, most people plant potatoes in trenches, and I'll talk about that, but it's not what I would recommend. If you're colonizing a lawn or some new space, go get yourself a ton of cardboard. Now, I mean brown cardboard, not glossy. And with as little tape as possible, preferably no tape and no staples. Refrigerator boxes are by far the best you can, and you can usually get them for free at an appliance store. Just give them a call and say you'd like some and often they'll set them aside for you. Cover the entire area with cardboard, two layers if you can. If you're planting in an established bed, then you can cut the cardboard into three-foot wide strips and make rows of strips next to one another. Next, you'll want wood chips. Ask a local arborist. Get on chipdrop.com or buy them if you have to, but spread the wood chips in parallel in two-foot paths with one foot between them. In an established bed, you can run the path right down the middle of those three-foot strips of cardboard, leaving the abutted edges free. Then you take your seed potatoes and place them at one-foot spacing on the cardboard. One trick is to use your foot as a spacer, and you can step down carefully after the first spud with your heel and then drop the next one at your toe and then repeat. And in the established bed, you can tuck those tubers in the gap between the cardboard so they can access the subsoil. Then, each spud should get covered by a quart, but preferably two or even three quarts of compost. You could even do two now and one halfway through the growing season. Finally, I use wheat straw to mulch over the now planted spud rows. If I can, I wet the bale down a few weeks earlier and let it sit for a few days so that it starts to rot and break apart. And then I spread it over the rows and this keeps the potatoes covered and it also keeps the ground cool because most potatoes stop growing in the ground. They stop producing tubers if the soil gets over 80 some degrees. Then, once it's all in place, wet the whole thing down so it doesn't blow away and that's it. This is so much easier than trenching and yields almost as much. This is a really good way to convert a lawn or grass or other land into grow beds. But if you absolutely insist on growing in trenches and doing twice as much labor per pound, have at it. In that case, you dig six inch deep trenches at three foot spacings. You'd put down the tubers the same way at one foot spacings and then you'd compost on the bottom and then cover the whole thing up. And then as the potato plants grow, you'll want to continue to hill up around the base of the plants and this is with both methods. You can do it with straw or mulch or soil and this keeps the new tubers covered from the sun which causes them to turn green. The reason I'm not encouraging the trenching method is because of the results of a 2018 study we did with 10 market gardeners across Southern Wisconsin. We wanted to find the best non-mechanized method for growing potatoes at large but non-industrial scale. You can find this on our website under the research tab, lowtechinstitute.com slash research. We'll also link in the show notes to an article that was published in Mother Earth News describing our results if you want to read more. But in essence, we tested five common methods found online, trench and hill, surface planted with mulch, surface planted with newspaper, weed barrier, grow beds and potato towers. Each plot got the same number and weight of seed potatoes, compost and mulch. Each gardener recorded for each plot how many times they watered, how much time they spent weeding, their overall labor and then the total yield. The results boiled down to the fact that there's no one best way to grow potatoes. We can say a little bit about each method. We'll start with trenching. Trenching yielded the most yield per plant but that required twice as much labor per pound. They were also susceptible to wet conditions and rot. So if space is at a minimum and you have the time to spare and it's not gonna be too wet, you could consider trenching. We also tried two surface methods, one with newspaper as a barrier and then straw and then one just with straw. Both were mulched with straw. Like I said, the surface methods yielded three quarters of the trench yield per plant but it required half the labor per pound. It also did better in wet conditions because it kept them above the moist soil. The only problem was that potatoes were susceptible to voles. So if you have the space, plant a third more than you would for trenching and you'll get the same overall yield with half the work but beware of voles. If they're around, they'll destroy your crop. The plots with a weed barrier required so much less weeding, almost none, than the other methods mentioned so far. So we would recommend at least one, if not two layers of cardboard and again, this practically eliminates weeding. We also tried grow bags. We found that their yield was lower but their labor was also very low. The Kenosha Potato Project exclusively grows in bags and might do better with their methods because they have a lot more experience. Check out their website. This is a good method in tight spaces with less access to land. It required no weeding but it was hard to keep them watered and cooled because they're above ground. They get hit with a lot of sun. We also tried potato towers which did not work at all. Bill Whitson has a really good breakdown on cultivatable.com. I'll link to it. He breaks down the biology but essentially I've tried them multiple years with no luck. Others have tried them with no luck. Some online say they've gotten potatoes to grow through the whole depth of the tower but the overall yield still wasn't spectacular. Don't bother with the cost and the ineffectiveness of this method. Now, as the potatoes grow you'll need to care for them a little. They need some weeding. Although if you have multiple cardboard weeding is practically eliminated. Watch out for potato beetles which look like squishy red bugs. The easiest method to get rid of them is to walk the rows in the morning or evening, pluck them off and drop them into a bucket of soapy water or feed them to your chickens. In a week or two of regular walking they'll be done for the year. Keep an eye they might come back. Potatoes don't like also to have wet soil so water them when the soil below the mulch begins to dry. If you mulch heavily you may not need to water at all. We usually don't. Again, straw milk helps keeps not only the moisture in the soil but it keeps it cool and producing. So it's worth the investment up front. As the plants grow more and more soil needs to be healed up on the plants to keep the emerging potatoes buried. With the trenching method a hoe can be used to weed and heal at the same time. For the surface method a little more wet straw goes a long way. After a hundred plus days depending on the variety the plants will die back. Once the plants are dry and after a couple days of dry weather it's a good time to harvest. The best method for surface planted is just to brush back the straw, pick up your pretty new clean potatoes. The first time we did this my partner kept giving me exasperated looks and after we finished a row I said, what's going on? And she said, why haven't we been doing this forever? Why have we been trenching? It's so much more work than she was right. And we've never trench since. For the trenchers you have to dig back down and remove all your potatoes which is why there twice as much work per pound. All I have to say is while you're digging them back up have fun and consider surface planting next year. Now that you have your potatoes let them dry a little bit and then brush the soil off with some gloved hands before storing them in bins or some other container that keeps their moisture in with a little air flow. Think about the potato bags you get at the grocery store they're plastic with little holes for ventilation. I use old grain bags with the plastic liner removed. Potatoes like to be stored in the dark at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit and 90% humidity. For me this means under the emergency stairs to my basement which doesn't freeze but is well below 40 all winter and the bags help keep the humidity in. Every month, which doesn't always happen I try to sort through the bags removing any that have turned green which become my seed potatoes and then any that have become softer mushy get thrown away, not composted because they could carry disease. How many potatoes would you need to grow to feed yourself? A perusal of various sources says that the Irish were eating nine pounds of potato per person per day before the famine. Now these were big watery coppers or whatever they were called. When I grew all our own food one year we only stored about 200 pounds of potatoes but that's still about 70,000 calories and that was done without too much trouble. We actually grew a lot more as the first lockdown was happening when we weren't sure what was gonna happen in the fall. So we grew hundreds and hundreds of pounds of potatoes and they all went to the food pantry thanks to my efforts of my neighbor Phil with whom I shared a potato plot. In the future where you're more dependent on what you can grow, you'd have to up your potato consumption. You can't just start growing all your own wheat. You have to plant it the season before you have to have the tools you have to have the know-how. If you planted or if you plan to eat two pounds of potatoes a day that's about 700 calories or a third of what you'd need. You'd need about one plant per person per day if you're planting on the surface like I do. It sounds like a lot but amounts less than seven days total eight hour days of work for the whole season. Giving you a third of your calories. Think about that seven days of work providing a third of your calories for the whole year. An acre would grow enough potatoes. An acre is about the size of an American football field that would grow enough potatoes for 40 people at that rate. 40 people, a third of their calories and with neighbors it would be a much easier task to work together on this. So let's go back to thinking about 2050. Potatoes are the clear choice for locally produced calories. If we're depending on our own ability to grow food no other staple compares to the ease of growing and storing potatoes. But this just isn't just applicable to 2050. Right now in 2022 we see growing food prices and other uncertainties in the market. During the Great Depression and both world wars people turned to growing more of their own food at home. Potatoes are the choice staple for times of trouble as long as we learn the lessons from the last podcast. That is, we should avoid relying on a single variety of potatoes like the Irish did. We should plant diverse varieties in a few different locations and with different methods if possible. This mimics the successful strategy of the Inca and other cultures in the Andes that survived El Niños. This spreads out the risk and makes a bountiful crop more likely regardless of the local growing conditions. In future episodes we'll talk more about homegrown wheat. A topic that may have a lot of interest as the harvest approaches this summer considering that Russia and Ukraine produce about 15% of the global wheat supply and the former won't be able to sell its wheat internationally and the latter won't have the chance to harvest what's left of its crops. And this doesn't even touch on fertilizer production when it's a lot of it comes from Russia. That's a story for another episode. If you wanna be sure to hear it, hit the subscribe button. And now really briefly we'll recap a little bit of what we have going on around the Institute this week. Spring is a very busy time for us to get our garden going. We are prepping our growing beds behind us. We're spreading out horse manure. There's a couple mounds behind me here and getting our thousands of seedlings going in the greenhouse, which you can also see over my shoulder. We're looking forward to some upcoming classes including one on grafting and pruning apple trees and another will learn to spin wool into yarn. We have space in both classes but they might be full by the time you hear this. You can find out more under the events tab on our website, lowtechinstitute.org. That's all we have for this week. The Low Tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. At the moment the show is hosted, edited and distributed by me, Scott Johnson, although we are looking for an intern, a paid internship this summer. If you are in mass, com or media at a university and you'd like to intern with us, get in touch. This episode was recorded at the Low Technology Garden and our intro music was walking in the rain off the album Bitter Sweet Endings by Krohander. That song is under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license and this podcast is under the Creative Commons attribution and share like license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or Tune in Radio and now YouTube. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants and underwriting. You can find out more information at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media. You can reach me directly. I'm at scottatlowtechinstitute.org. Thanks so much for watching or listening and take care.