growing potatoes in raised beds

[majorcatfish]

morning everyone,
went to the feed store yesterday to pick up a couple bags of greensand and the wife saw seed potatoes and onion sets, so we purchased 10# of Yukon gold and a pound of red and white onions.
after reading other posts on how making sure that you get at least 2 eyes per piece and putting sulfur on them prior to planting.

as you can tell I am a newbie to growing potatoes.....

we are going to make some raised beds to plant the onions and potatoes and other things..planning on making the raised beds 10"-12" high
now here's a question on the potato bed, knowing that I will have to hill them

how high should i plan on hilling them over the season??????

another question, since we will be having topsoil delivered from the nursery, knowing that's it's a mix of field dirt and compost. any good ideas what should I amend it with?

 

[Ridgerunner]

I'm not going to tell you what to amend it with but don't amend it with manure. Manure can cause scabbing. Well composted manure is fine, just not raw manure.

How high to hill? Somebody recently showed some photos of the potatoes they grew in some type of containment where they kept hilling up. I cant remember who, but the photos showed that the potatoes grow in a bunch right above the seed potato. They do not grow on up the stalk if you keep hilling them. So once you have enough you have enough.

There are two main purposes to hilling them. One is just to make them easier to dig. You could dig a deep trench, start the potato and fill that trench as they grow, but those would be a pain to dig. Its much easier to plant them maybe a couple of inches deep and drag up a hill over them as they grow.

The other purpose of hilling them is to keep sunlight off the potato tubers. If sunlight hits the potatoes they can develop a poison called solanine. Theyll also turn green so dont eat green potatoes. Youd have to eat a fair amount of the solanine potatoes to do any harm but its best to avoid poison, at least in my opinion.

I grow mine in an open garden, not a raised bed and Ive never measured how high I hill. I pull dirt up around the plant and bury the bottom part that is growing two, maybe three times. Id guess about a foot but really havent measured it. Im lowering the soil level between the rows as I pull dirt to hill up so its hard to say how much I actually pull up.

Another caution. That soil you pull up is pretty loose. Mine crusts over when it gets wet, but when it dries out it can crack. Ive had to go back after Ive finished hilling them to pull dirt over those cracks to keep sunlight off the developing potatoes.

 

[majorcatfish]

ridgerunner,since my post I have had a pot of coffee and a couple smokes and have done a whole bunch of reading up
your post has confirmed everything that I have read so far.. thank you

the thing had me stumped was how high to hill !!!!!
since I have been reading up on how to grow potatoes this morning, I know enough to be a master potato grower..<and yes I am a French model>

being my first attempt at potatoes will take any and all advice...

 

[vfem]

Here's our potato harvesting from last year in the raised bed we used. Got about 17+ lbs. The yukon gold did very nicely, and we did the red skin too. We dug trenches and I covered from the mound next to them as they grew up, so I didn't have to mound very high. Most the potatoes were at the bottom.

Also, its best to do onions in the garden around the same time as garlic, for our zone that is like October.

 

[digitS']

There are a couple of perspectives on spuds - I like Ridgerunner's with a couple of angles on them.

French model!!?!

Anyway, green potatoes are bitter! So . . . .

I don't grow a field of spuds so my 100sqft or so is fairly easy to tend. The seed goes down about 6" and I "hill" by hand. Oh, I may use a shovel for transport but have to be careful with the tender stems and leaves. Mostly, I'm doing not much more than a thorough covering of any tubers that have or might be coming thru the surface.

Some of the composition of my compost is soil and compost is what I've been using the last few seasons for hilling potatoes. It provides some mid-season plant nutrients but I also put down some organic fertilizer and cover that with the compost. I'm back after a couple of weeks to be sure that none of the spuds are poking above the soil surface and need more covering.

I don't think I'm anywhere near 12" for the hilling but the plants might be able to take that much comfortably. Whatever the case, good garden soil &/or compost gathered around most garden plants is a good thing . . .

Steve

 

[secuono]

I bought the same potatoes last year, I just stuck them in the bed and covered a few inches. Kept adding dirt until about 1.5ft of it was covered and waited. They did great, no special care or anything.

 

[Ridgerunner]

French model!!?!

A TV commercial. The premise is that you can believe anything you read on the internet.


Anyway, green potatoes are bitter! So . . . .

I try to not comment on personal taste too much. Some people actually like arugula, roquette, rocket or whatever you call that stuff. Personal taste is one thing but poison is poison. It gets people's attention better too.

 

[Mickey328]

I love doing the "container" thing...you get a LOT of potatoes and no digging is needed...less work and you don't end up with gouges from a shovel or fork.

The easiest one I did was just with some chicken wire type fencing. I cut off enough to make a "tube" about 30 inches in diameter, and used cable ties to hook it together. Set the tube on some prepped soil and stick in your seed spuds. Cover them with dirt. When the plants are up about 10 inches or so, add more dirt, leaving just the top 3 or 4 inches showing. When they grow up again, add more dirt. Keep doing this till the end of the season when the plant parts die off and then just cut the cable ties...everything just falls out, including the potatoes which you only have to pick up and clean off

One word of caution, and we discovered this the hard way...if you're in a place where the sun is very intense, you need to shade the "tube"...or it will just cook the spuds The light needs to reach the growing plants but the soil needs to be protected from the intense heat.

 

[JimWWhite]

I've grown potatoes in raised bed boxes for the past four years and we've gotten great results. Last year in one 4'x8'x12" box we got 96 pounds of red Pontiac potatoes (or at least that's the kind we think we planted). The other box was a little less productive but that's because the puppy got in the garden before I fenced it in and messed up one box. Did you know that a dog carcass makes a good fertilizer? Sure does... Anyways, what I did was to take out all but about 2 inches of soil from the box and then scraped three furrow lines about a foot apart the length of the box and put down seed cuttings spaced about 10" apart. Then I covered everything up with about two more inches of soil. When the potato plants came up and were a couple of inches tall I covered them up with another two inches of soil. As I remember I repeated this two more times until the box was full again. I started everything the first weekend in March. I'm planning on doing the same thing this year but this time the other box will be planted with fingerlings that I've sprouted from store-bought potatoes. But I'll have to do it without dog fertilizer since I have a fence around the whole garden this year... I sure miss that puppy...

 

[baymule]

<and yes I am a French model>

PICS!! we want PICS!!