It’s been a couple years since we’ve tried to raise potatoes. We did it for a few years, but decided to stop after getting disappointing yields for the amount of space the plants took up. After we signed up for our community garden plot this year we realized we had a lot of square footage to work with and we decided to give potatoes another shot.
We picked out the Red Norland potatoes from High Mowing Seeds. A good choice for Northern growers, a good keeper and supposedly resistant to scab. We got 2.5 pounds of seed potatoes to plant.
There are a lot of ways to grow potatoes. Recently Organic Gardening magazine did an article outlining Seven Ways To Plant Potatoes. We decided to go with a hybrid approach, using some mixture of raised bed and straw mulch methods.
Along one side of our plot there was a section that had seemingly been worked more recently or more thoroughly in the past. The ground was much looser than the rest of the plot. We continued to work that strip over the last couple months, amending the soil with leaf mulch and most recently mixing in some straw. At this point the soil is significantly looser than the rest of the plot and looking pretty nice for potato growing.
Emma’s dad brought us several hemlock boards to use to make our raised beds. Along the edge of the plot, there is already a small wall of cinder blocks, so we decided to use that for one side of our raised beds and then just create another hemlock wall across from it.

Here you can see the hemlock wall after we put it up
To build the hemlock walk, I picked up some 24″ steel stakes. These can be found next to the concrete at the Home Depot. I nailed one of these about 4″ in from each end of the hemlock boards with the top of the stake even with the top of the boards. This left about 10-12″ of stake left to sink into the ground. I then hammered two other stakes on the opposite sides of the boards spaced evenly over the length of the boards to provide support from both sides.
Once complete, I dug a trench down the middle of the bed, hilling the dirt on either side of the bed. The seed potatoes will be planted in the middle of the trench. As the plants begin to grow, we’ll just pull the dirt from the sides of the bed to hill around the plants. We’ll then add some straw to help mulch and build up the mounds without having to import as much dirt.

Here you can kinda see the trench in the middle of the bed (late evening shadows made getting a photo of this difficult
We’ll probably plant the potatoes over the weekend.
Oh, yeah, peas are looking great. While I was building the potato beds, Emma was weeding and mulching the peas.

Triumphant farmer!!