Potato Circle

POTATO!

Hello, Ben here. Well, there's a new addition to the SEED garden. But first, a lilting rhyme about our subterranean nightshade:

Potato potato potato,
is in the family of tomato.
But although it is round
and grows in deep ground,
the potato is not a tomato.

Yeah! Well recently I put in a raised potato bed. Potatoes grow underground and like deep deep soil to grow their tasty taters. Now, traditional farmers will just raise a shitload of soil. This works, but the drawbacks are that you have to disturb the soil a hell of a lot to plant them, and then rip it up again to harvest the potatoes. Tough on the plants and the soil. Not that I totally did this exact thing next to the house.

Right.

Ha, not me. My totally not stolen idea (not totally stolen from neighbor Will McCraken) is to create only about 6 inches of good soil, and then stack on lots of easy much material like straw, leaf cuttings, and paper shreds from Oberlin bureaucracy HQ down the street. A circle of chicken wire lets me stack this cheap soil up 3-4 feet! Now, the potatoes can grow up through feet after feet of loose mulch, and just lay those potato babies all the way up. As the new potatoes poke through, I just add more mulch. More mulch equals more potatoes!

The benefits are that now to harvest, I simply have to shift aside the straw/grass/paper/etc and pick the potaties without killing the plant. It's like picking a tomato from the vine.

Step by Step:

1: choose a 5-8 foot diameter circle of land somewhere that gets full to mostly full sun ( plus yum yum sun points).

2: layer down cardboard. This kills grass and weeds underground leaving no problems subduing those pesky natives (minus 5,000 post-colonial sensitivity points).

3: set in some posts along the perimeter of the circle, and then wrap chicken wire around the posts (easier said then done, minus 10 minutes).

4: add 6 inches of soil. (plus 6 inches of soil points).

5: plant potatoes (maybe 1.5 feet apart? Plus 20 agricultural experimentation points).

6: stack up loose mulchy stuff (plus 10 creativity points for organic matter).

7: water em in.


There it is, a raised potato bed, in 7 steps.

-Ben