Kitchen Garden Forum

A comment by Johnboy that 'farmers plant their potatoes 12 inches deep and have enormous crops' prompted me to try to do the same. I put them down as far as I could and ridged them up - sometimes my ridges weren't very accurately done so the plants came out the side, but there have been far fewer green ones than normal.

Anyway, I have had the largest crop of Charlotte yet - and clean. Bonnie, which is also a second early, went in a little later and is now being lifted. Unfortunately blight has attacked the foliage and the tubers also seem susceptible - Charlotte tubers seem fairly resistant to both blight and slugs. And whereas with Charlotte I was getting a lot of large tubers, Bonnie is giving far fewer and far larger. The largest tuber to date, fortunately slug and blight free, is a whopping 1lb 14 1/4 oz.

One problem with burying the tubers so deep is that it makes digging them up far more difficult!

Interesting.

I have a vague memory that Alan Refail posted a year or so ago that he was experimenting with not ridging up - just planting his spuds. I can't remember how deep he put them, but that would appear to be almost the opposite of what you've done.

Alan, can you refresh our memories and let us know if you kept up with this, changed etc?

I do something similar, digging a trench a spit deep, putting in a layer of compost or manure to sit the potatoes in, a sprinkle of slug pellets and then filling it in and ridging it up. I don't have to touch them again and don't get any green ones. The shoots sometimes take a short cut and grow out of the side of the ridge, but it doesn't make any difference.

I found the soil very dry under the ones I've dug and would have given them more water if I had realised how dry they were, and would probably have got slightly larger potatoes.

One thing I tried with the seed potatoes that decided to sprout too early to plant outside was to use potato growing bags with the compost mixture that Medwyn Williams recommended in an earlier issue of KG. The tops grew to well above my head and I had to put 5 ft garden canes in to hold them up and they produced some huge tubers, so I might try it again next year. I can't remember the exact proportions but it had calcified seaweed and QX4 mixed into the compost and there might have been some sharp sand.

I do similar to Plumpudding, not quite so deep, but because of the long dry periods we get here, I add 8 gallons of water per 20 ft row of trench. When that has soaked in, I add potato fertilizer and slug pellets. So far the crop has been very impressive
If the Desiree and Cara crop as well as Rocket and Charlotte have, I Shall easily have enough for winter