Sheet Composting in the Potato Patch

[ducks4you]

I WISH we were neighbors! REALLY!! You wouldn't think that 30 chickens and 3 horses would produce SO MUCH stall litter...but they do. I have many places to dump on the 5 acres, but I always have too much compost...and not enough time to move it to my vegetable beds. If you have any stable near you, call them. All the feed/grain/supplement bags are now plastic, and come in 40-50 lb sizes, and boarders just throw them away. With the stable's permission, a roll of duct tape (to close the tops and prevent transportation spillage) and your own shovel, you can fill as many bags as you can transport of free, fresh stall leavings. Most horsepeople use pine shavings or pine sawdust. I use this and a product that begins as super dried extruded pine pellets and cleans up as a powder, plus I use straw. Sometimes there will be some hay and/or hay seeds, but if it's free grass it isn't a big deal to pull from your beds.
Horse manure takes 4 months to break down, the shavings take longer, but we know that they help fluff up the soil. You could separate them and mulch with them, too.

 

[digitS']

Ducks', I have done it. By the pickup load and both cow and horse.

If the stable litter was too clean, I used to add ammonium sulfate to it. Well, I did that once. Works in composting.

It might also make sense for me to move soil off the beds in the spring so that it is available for mulching later. Of course, I could also NOT crowd the beds so tight so that I could just "hill!"

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

I like to label any soil that doesn't produce well as "bad soil." Bad soil deserves to be punished, so I like to dig it up and move it to "soil jail", out where my horses compress it. They also are likely to fertilize on top of it, too.
Every article I have read on compost suggests that you either lightly till or don't till at all, just use a spade or fork to turn it. Even shoveling it and moving it is better than tilling it. My last heavily tilled bed got really hard the same season and NOBODY walks on any of my raised beds, so it didn't make sense. So I've cut back on using my tiller. Certainly I'll till in my horse's turnout area bc when I got new fencing they put it in in February and created ruts. Tilling was one way to level them out.
Could this be part of what you are doing? Just guessing and I hope this helps.

 

[digitS']

Well, I think potatoes pretty much always benefit from either hilling or mulching. The soil in the little veggie garden where I grow them is plenty soft but . . .

It has to do with the location where the tubers develop. (You probably know this, Ducks'.) They are on the stems, not really down with the roots. Exposed to light, they will turn green . . . and there goes the potato harvest!

Besides, spuds are heavy feeders. At least, they benefit from plenty of nitrogen and if I can get organic fertilizer covered with something, the soil organisms can more quickly make it available to the plants.

There really isn't much time with the early potato varieties. We can plant potatoes early but the foliage can't freeze or they are set back and have to start again. They grow fairly well in cool temperatures but they can take a long time to show up in 45°f to 50° soil. Then, those "earlies" start to go down after only a few weeks of warm, summer weather. Seems like I've got about a week in the spring when I can get the fertilizer on them and have it do any good.

Steve