How to grow potatoes without digging?

Growing potatoes without digging, how is it done? The ground preparation is exactly the same as for any other vegetable. You don't need to have a special bed for potatoes. You certainly don't need to dig a trench. So it's simply undisturbed soil in this case with mulch on top and my mulch is compost. So this is a few centimeters, maybe three, four centimeters of compost here that we put on last autumn after clearing leaks, which interestingly were following potatoes. This bed has grown potatoes four years in a row already. This is gonna be the fifth. So that's another aspect of growing, actually most vegetables, you don't have to rotate perhaps as much as is sometimes claimed. And then what kind of potato are you gonna grow? There are many types or three main ones. First early are the ones that mature most quickly and they're often ready in early summer, June in the Northern Hemisphere. Second early follow them about a month later and main crops again another month or even longer. So that's three categories of potato maturity. It's very good when you buy your seed to be clear what you're getting so that you know when they're going to be ready. Because if you plant first earlies and leave them in the ground all summer, they're probably just gonna get eaten by slugs or whatever. They're not gonna grow anymore basically. They finish growing in say June. So these are second earlies, variety Charlotte, really nice variety, I warmly recommend it. And they're going to mature sometime early to mid July, depending on the weather a bit. We're now in second week of April. That's where we are here, zone 8B, 51 North is a very good time to plant potatoes. We can have frost here until around 10th, 15th of May even. So for another month, still there's a risk of frost. If there is a frost on potato leaves, it doesn't kill the plants often, or usually it doesn't, but it will damage the leaves and set back the growth. So that's why one tries to avoid it by not planting potatoes too early. And the actual process of planting, actually there's one more thing I should say before putting it in the ground is the chits. A chit is shoots on a potato, little sprouts, and they're going to be the stems which turn into leaves. And then from the potato itself, there'll be little roots coming out. And the roots are not the tubers, they're not the potatoes, but the roots. And the roots are very happy to go into no-dig ground. There is no difficulty in growing no-dig potatoes. They love the undisturbed soil. But the tubers that are going to develop need soft conditions, and that's where the compost comes in, which is on the top. So the tubers will develop in this compost. And this is how I plant. I'm just making a little hole here with the trowel. So I'm going down to about the depth of the trowel, pulling the compost towards me. So I'm not actually making a hole, just a slit in the compost really, putting it in that way. If you look at a seed potato, you'll see there's the end where the stem came last year, and then that's the end that was facing outwards, and that's where the new shoots come out of. So put that upwards, and it's just going to nestle down there in the compost. And then I'm just covering over like that. That's planting a potato. And just a word on spacing, this little bed here, it's four feet, 1.2 meters wide, two meters, six and a half feet long, and we're putting eight potato seeds in here. So they're on the close side probably compared to what is sometimes done. But we'll see as they grow. That should give quite a few potatoes, no giant ones, lots of medium size. Here we are then on the 4th of June, and eight weeks or so since planting these potatoes, and you can see what amazing growth they've made. It's like, wow. It's one reason why I actually thought, there's no rush to plant potatoes in the spring. As soon as it warms up like it has done in May, particularly here this year above all, the growth is just so rapid that a slightly later planting will very quickly overtake an earlier one, which might also have got hit by a late frost. So here the last frost actually was in, God, it was middle of April. We've had very little frost this year, late frost. So these have had uninterrupted growth, and this variety, Charlotte, being second early, it's still got a way to go before the tubers are gonna get any size. However, I was having a little look in, oh yeah, look at that. Ah, there's a potato. And actually it's bigger than I thought it might be. It's about altogether golf ball size, slightly elongated, which is how Charlotte tubers grow. They're quite long. And it's starting to push up towards the light. So at the moment there's enough compost around it to stop it going green, but it won't be long before we shall, probably for about, for each plant, take a smaller shovel full of compost and just drop it over the plants. And I'm not gonna do it on these yet because they're not ready for it, but I'd like to do it over there where I've got some first early potatoes, and we'll look at them in a minute so you can just see how that process happens. One wonders, does that damage the leaves? But no, not at all. And basically these are fine at the moment, nothing more to do until, say, two weeks, we'll drop a bit more compost on. And I think about two weeks after that, which will be second week of July, probably, we shall be harvesting. So that's the next time we'll come back to these ones to see the harvest, which will be just pulling them out. So let's just, today, 4th of June, go and have a quick look at the first early potatoes over there. So here we have first early potatoes, which a variety called Casablanca. And you can see the classic thing of they're making lovely little flowers. They've popped out only very recently, which also actually raises the question that's often quoted that you shouldn't harvest your potatoes until you've seen them flowering, which isn't always true because not all first early varieties do flower before their leaves go yellow and pretty much die off. And that's certainly a sign that you want to harvest them if that should happen to you with first early potatoes particularly, because they're programmed to just grow very fast and then not exactly die, but the leaves go yellow. And that is a sign that they're ready to harvest because they're not going to grow anymore. The tubers will just sit in the ground and get eaten by slugs and other things. So you want to get them out. But when the tubers, the leaves are all lovely and green, like we can see here, there's hardly any yellow ones anywhere. That's a sign that they're still, the tubers are still getting bigger and bigger underneath. And in fact, we can have a look. So on the ground, have a little rummage. And what are we seeing? By the way, there's a cabbage growing here, which is a bit in the way I know, and it's meant to have been ready for harvest. Now, it wasn't. It's had a difficult spring. It's been a bad spring for cabbages. It's a greyhound. There's one here that's pretty well ready actually, and that one will come out because my plan is to plant cucumbers here. But basically, that's why the cabbage is in the way. We have potato. So there you can see an early one. Do you see how the feeder root is coming from the potato plant? And that's gonna be causing, allowing this plant, this tuber to swell. So I'm gonna put that one back in the ground, and then I'm gonna drop a bit of compost on this. Two ways you could earth up for, one's a better way of putting it. I call it composting up because we're using compost, and it would be easier if this cabbage wasn't in the way. But basically, you can pull surface compost from near the plant up to it. So you're making a mound just around where the potatoes are developing, which is quite close to the stems. And another thing you can do is put a little bit of new compost. So on top, I've got here a two-liter pot, two liters of compost, that is. And this is what we do sometimes. We just pull the stems apart a bit and drop it on top like that. So that is also serving to, what you're really trying to do is not about feeding the plant. It's about stopping light getting on the developing tubers, which would cause them to go green. And that solanine, which is a little bit poisonous, it won't kill you, but you don't wanna eat too much of it. So having either pulling compost around or dropping compost on top is a way of keeping light off the developing tubers, keeping them nice and white, so that when it comes to harvest time, which in the case of these plants will be any time from two to three weeks, I reckon, they're all gonna be nice tubers that we can pull out. It's now five weeks since we were here last. And in that time, we have put some more compost on these potatoes, about a small shovelful on each one. And it's also been extremely dry, unusual. So in those five weeks, it's actually rained just four millimeters, less than a fifth of an inch of rain. So these plants have grown with almost no input of water until about 10 days ago, we did start to give them some water. And if you are gonna water, it's the most efficient time to water is near harvest, when the tubers are swelling. And they're starting to now go over. I think you can see a change in color there of the leaf. It's not looking so dark green, starting to go a bit yellow. That indicates the plants are getting old and not working very hard anymore. The tubers won't be swelling much. So there's no advantage to leaving the potatoes to try and grow for much longer. And we want to plant leeks here actually. So the idea is to get these out today and plant leeks as soon as possible. The leek plants are all ready. So let's have a look. And the harvest I'm going to, I get my hands right around all the stems, I pull, see what comes up. So this is Charlotte and so far so good. One thing I didn't mention actually was blight. People worry about it a lot, justifiably. This is not blight. That's just old decay. Blight looks different. It's more leaves going generally translucent and it would also need to have had some wet weather and we haven't had that. So it's just old age in this case. Anyway, these tubers are mostly near the surface because I find in no dig that since the ground below hasn't been loosened or forked or dug, the tubers themselves, the potatoes, don't actually manage to get down very deep. So that helps with getting them out without having to use a spade or fork. And you can see how they're, they're all quite close together. So far so good actually, that's looking nice. And really I'm rummaging in the surface compost. I'm not, I'm barely going into the original soil much, although of course that has been mixed up by worms and everything. And that's pretty much it for that one. So that's one plant. And in a minute, I'll weigh these up just to give you an idea of how much we're getting here. I'll just do one more now before I carry on and finish the bed. They're all fairly similar. We were harvesting a few yesterday and they were consistent. They're also, because of the dry weather, coming out beautifully clean. So that's one advantage. Although generally with no dig potatoes, I do find that they come out cleaner than when soil is disturbed. Because on the dig no dig trial I do, the potatoes from the dug bed are generally dirtier. Something to do with the structure having been disturbed and then that makes the soil stick to potatoes and all root vegetables actually. So there we are, not quite so many on that one. It's actually not the hugest harvest that we'd have had if it had rained more. This is actually dust now. There's hardly any moisture in it at all. So I think considering that, I'm not unhappy with what we're getting. I mean, it's been very little effort to grow this crop. Potatoes are an easy vegetable to grow. So for a result like that, and these will now keep, these can keep in a sack for a long time so that you can eat them at any stage. And I'm gonna carry on and then we'll cut back in when I've finished the harvest and we've done some weighing up to see what's here. So I finished harvesting the seven plants that were here. There was an eighth that we'd already harvested before. And we have three little beds, each had eight plants and they've all had slightly different soil treatment. The first one nearest the camera, we put a fork in every winter and lever to loosen, aerate the soil. And this one by comparison is no dig, no disturbance whatsoever. And that one, which we call strip one, has the same amount of compost put on top as this one strip two. So it's comparing forked soil with no dig. And then the third bed up there is also no dig, but it has different compost. And that's well-rotted cow manure as opposed to a mixture of green waste and mushroom compost. So this is finer compost here, bought compost. And that one, well, I buy it as well, but it's from a local farmer who's not a compost maker. It's well-rotted two-year-old, even three-year-old cow manure. So with the same plantings, we're comparing the harvests of these potatoes in those three different soil conditions. A further aspect of what's going on here, all these different trials, I'm just curious to see what happens if you don't rotate. So this is actually the fourth year in a row of growing potatoes in this same strip of soil. And well, they're not bad, are they? But one thing we are finding a bit of a problem with doing that is volunteer potatoes, not major. But this spring, we had a few that we missed last year, not many, and we were pulling them out just about clear, not always, which was the volunteer and which was the actual planting. And up there, we made a mistake and pulled out one of the planted potatoes and then replanted, which is why there's some very small ones. And there's also one we missed, a volunteer, and that's why we've got pink ones right at the end. That's actually from two years ago when I grew some Mary Rose pink potatoes. And I must admit, that's one aspect I hadn't considered in terms of not rotating with potatoes, the question of volunteers. So now we're gonna gather them up and weigh them and we'll see what happens. We've now gathered up the potatoes and weighed them. And the results are strip three with the no-dig cow manure, 14.2 kilograms. And that includes for each bed, we've added in the one plant that we'd harvested earlier. So that's eight potato plants have given the 14 kilos, which is over 30 pounds of potatoes. Next up, we have the no-dig with the finer mulch, green waste and mushroom compost. And this was the slightly heavier again, 14.3 kilos, not well over 30 pounds. A very nice result for not a huge amount of effort. And thirdly, we have the one where we fork the soil supposedly to loosen it, which once again, and I've noticed this pretty consistently in this trial where we're doing all lots of different beds in the same way. The forking has depressed the yield, it's 12.8 kilos. So less potatoes from doing that forking, which the conclusion I'm coming to is that even that amount of soil disturbance is not helping plants to grow. Maybe it's damaging soil fungi or whatever. And there's also the aspect of the fact that this is four years in a row of growing potatoes in the same soil. And I've actually got the results here. So starting in 2015, we had 26.9 kilos for all three beds added together. 2016, 43.6, so it went up. Second year. Third year, which was last year, 29.4. And mostly, I think this is reflecting weather and conditions. Last year, we had a late frost. This year, no frost, but it's been dry, but our total is 41.3. So fourth year, we're doing not bad. So that's 41.3 kilos. That's over 90 pounds of potatoes from this area. That is food that you can put in a sack to store and eat when you're ready to. It's a very economical vegetable to grow. And it gives you chance, I wanna show you now, to grow something else, because we are now only the 11th of July. That's pretty much halfway through the growing season. I'll leave that there for now. I'll just work on this middle bed and work. It's actually not much needs doing. All I'm doing is raking. This is the other thing, actually, that is worth considering. I know that people who are not used to no-dig find this very strange. Blow me down, there's a potato I missed. To see me walking on beds. But the thing is, when you haven't dug, you haven't disturbed the deeper structure, you're not damaging anything. What you're doing is just firming the surface compost, which is good, because then it will hold moisture more. And I'm just lightly raking it as well, just to get it level, because time is of the essence here. And we want to get the next crop in as soon as possible, in view of the time of year going on. And here they are. So we're gonna plant leeks. And these are leek plants which we sowed in April, multi-sown in modules, potted on into pots. So we've got an average of two or three. There's two in that one. You can see a nice root system there. So we're gonna make a hole with a trowel, pop them in, water them in well, and that's the next crop well underway. So all in all, from not a huge area of ground, we're getting a lot of food. No-dig, it's working really well.