today we are going to find out the results from my no dig potato bed experiment just
as a refresher i am gardening in zone 6a in ohio on very heavy clay soil and early this spring i
decided that i wanted to give a no-dig potato bed a try be sure to check out the link above
to see the original video where i put in this potato bed now i did have some concerns about
how well this is going to work for me here and the main one being that my native soil
is very heavy clay so i was a bit concerned that by just piling all of this stuff on top of really
hard impenetrable clay soil i was not going to have great results with the potatoes but we will
find out today you're finding out the same time as i am because despite the temptation i have not dug
any potatoes out of here yet i had two varieties planted on march 9th and today is july 21st and
all of my foliage is starting to die back so i'm gonna go ahead and dig some potatoes now potatoes
can be dug anytime after they start flowering but to give them the most time to size up and
increase your yields i generally look for all of the green foliage to start dying back before i dig
now this first variety i'm digging is a variety called golden globe
we got some potatoes down there and you can always save these teeny tiny guys and replant them
if your season is long enough and you have enough time for a second crop of
potatoes and then i generally just throw all of these tops in my compost pile
and to make this process a little easier i'm going to set some of this grass mulch
over to the side i'll throw it back on top when i'm all done digging
kind of helps me see what i'm doing a little better
but part of the appeal of this system for me anyway not that i'm opposed to
digging i like my traditional method of growing potatoes but my thought was by piling oh look
you don't want to do that don't stab your teeters was that by adding all this nice organic matter
so i've got compost in there hey straw grass clippings leaf mulch i was basically giving
myself a nice jump start on a new garden bed here even if my potatoes didn't turn out so well
as you can see here i had a little bit of sun exposure which you don't want but that
guy's already sprouting so i'll just replant him we have some decent sized ones in there
what i'm curious about
is if any of these potatoes actually does not look that way
they didn't actually go down into the clay dirt at all they're all setting right there on top
of the surface which true to the name no dig means i don't have to dig to harvest them either
now one thing i would definitely change if i were to do this again is the dimensions
of this bed i would probably do half this width because it was very difficult to reach into the
center of this bed and add extra hay and grass and mulch as these things grew without actually
stepping into the bed so i probably wouldn't do any wider than like a three foot strip
so there's half my bed this is all of the golden globes that i dug up
and the second half of the bed is an heirloom variety called german butterball now this one
overall looks to be a bit later than golden globe and the plants are a lot more indeterminate
so really if i wanted to i could leave these in the ground longer but i'm ready to get these out
of here and get this bed prepped for fall so we're going to go ahead and dig them and one thing i did
want to mention because in the first video you saw how i prepped the whole bed what you didn't
see was kind of the intermediate care i basically didn't do anything to these all season other than
layer them with more hay grass clippings leaf mulch basically to keep these plants healed up
so i went in i think twice and added more hay and grass and leaf mulch but that was it
these did not get watered these did not get fed other than the compost and food
i used at planting time so they were pretty much left to fend for themselves
and there is the full yield for the second variety this is german butterball as i
mentioned it's an old heirloom variety and you can see the size on these i have a lot of little
smaller spuds still there's a few decent ones but the size on the other variety was a little better
like i said had i given this a little more time these might have sized up more but i was ready to
get them out of the garden now one of the other concerns i had going into this was vole damage
so i did a small section of no dig last year where i just threw some purple viking potatoes
on top of an unplanted bed in my garden and just covered that with straw and it had decent yields
on that but i did have a lot of vole chewing damage on the spuds so i was kind of assuming
they would get in here and do the same thing but i'm not seeing any damage on these spuds at all
so i'm pleasantly surprised by that so here is the total yield from this no-dig plot which by the way
is seven feet by twelve feet i don't have my scale anymore otherwise i would weigh these for you
i'm guessing a good 30 pounds but i'm really bad at guesstimating weights but overall not a bad
yield and i'm left with a bed that's basically prepped and ready to go for fall planting
so i'm gonna talk that up as a win and be sure to subscribe to catch more gardening tips
tricks and experiments like this one on the grow fully with jenna youtube channel
thanks for watching and i'll see you next time
and