The Great Potato Experiment

Most years we plant potatoes.  We love eating potatoes and they're such an easy crop to grow. A win win really.  This year we bought three lots of seed potatoes because we just couldn't decide which variety to grow.  We had four free garden beds so we thought we'd experiment with some different planting methods.   We tried all three varieties of potatoes with the different methods.  We were interested to see which, if any, of the methods produced the best results.

For the first method, we mixed together lupin mulch, compost we made and some mixed manures (cow, sheep and chicken).  We put a layer of that on the bottom of the container, placed the potatoes on it and then added another layer of the mulch mix.  Each time the green leaves poked through we covered them with another layer of the mulch mix.   We kept doing this until the container was full.  For the second method we mixed some of the mulch mix with garden soil and used the same layering method.  For the third method we dug out a garden bed until there was about 15 cm of soil.  Then we put the potatoes on top and filled the container up with garden soil.  Those potatoes were well buried. 

All of the garden beds got the same amount of water and no supplementary feeding.  We weren't at home much after the spuds were planted though so we didn't keep on top of the pests.  I'm not sure what pest attacked the plants but three containers got well and truly feasted on before we got to them with some pyrethrum.  These are the plants when we left.

Three days later, this is what we found!! 

Pesky pests!!   On the plus side, even though the plants got hoed into by some ravenous bugs, they still produced lots of spuds.  Almost 21 kilos.  I'm not sure if that is a good yield from 3 kilos of seed potatoes or not, but it's enough to keep us happy.  We've gifted quite a lot to family and friends and still have enough in the pantry to keep us going for a good wee while.  In terms of the experiment, all of the methods yielded potatoes. Even the last one, where the potatoes were buried nice and deep. We really didn't expect the plants to make it through all that soil but they did.  The plants that got really badly eaten produced big quantities of spuds but they were very small.  Which isn't surprising really. They were both the pots planted entirely with the mulch mix.  Had those potatoes grown to full size they'd have definitely been the most productive plants.  That said, the other two beds were not far behind.  The potatoes planted in just soil were the only ones that didn't get eaten. They produced the biggest spuds.

The biggest spud weighed in at 700 gms.  The smallest one, well it was too tiny to weigh in at all. 

        

                                                        

This is some of the bounty.  

Now what can we do with all those spuds.  Steamed with butter (obviously), maybe mashed, rosti, soup, hash browns, gnocchi, gratin, chips, baked......the possibilities are endless.  Just don't tell my good doctor how many spuds we're eating.