There is no need for fork or spade in any way, shape or form. This is ideal for those who have problems bending and lifting heavy loads. It is also a good project for a school or aged home gardening project.
Mark out an area of lawn,
1. Lay down some weed suppressing material like carpet underlay, cardboard or thick layers of newspapers.
2. On this put a layer of compost and/or earth.
3. Put seed potatoes, or pieces of potato with eyes directly onto this layer of compost, exactly where you want them to grow
4. Cover this with a fairly generous layer of mulch or hay/straw, roughly 30 cm (1ft) deep.
5. Water this in well. Green plant shoots will come through this layer of material.
6. Add mulch as required to cover any tubers, which may grow on the surface of the mulch.
7. Water and treat pests and diseases regularly as required
8. With this method you can pull back part of the mulch to access some of the small potatoes for early use.
9. When the Haulms (Plants) have died back, you can pull back the remaining mulch to find a big crop of clean big potatoes. Which probably won’t even need to be cleaned.
10. Next growing season, lay the seed potatoes directly onto the broken down layer of mulch to start again.
This method of growing potatoes requires little effort, on the part of the gardener. You are able to grow potatoes anywhere from the lawn to a rooftop to a driveway.
It also helps teach youngsters about where and how some of the produce actually comes from and grow, rather than it simply coming from a greengrocer. So why not get out there today, and grow your own potatoes.
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3 comments:
Other options include growing your potatos in a bucket or collapsible garden bin. This helps with the feral potato problem or if space is an issue. There are a number of ideas for this on the net.
I don't know if it's true or not, but the Irish claim to have created this method. They call it the lazy bed method (lazy bed because it's used on fallow or 'lazy' ground). The only thing they do a little different is dig the space up between the rows, and use it weeds and all to cover and hill up the seed potatoes.
Since it's very important to rotate the ground used for growing potatoes, or you can get a wide range of nutrient, pest and disease problems including late blight, I would suggest using the ground the following year for other crops. Since potatoes don't use much nitrogen, and the ground will be free of weeds, it will be an excellent place for a wide variety of plants.
We have grown spuds in bushel baskets. Works quite well, and is much less work than the traditional in ground planting. We'll give your no-dig method a try next spring when. I'll let you know well how it works in Canada.
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