Hello, today I'm going to plant my potatoes in this super easy way.
I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm.
This morning I have prepared the ground here,
by going through it and as best I can, pulling out all the weed roots. I haven't
dug it, I haven't used a spade on it or a fork or a trowel or any of those.
Literally just pulling stuff up by hand and just in this patch, which is about
three feet by ten, I've pulled out an enormous sack full of weeds. And in spots
like this over here, this is a bramble under here, it's actually coming out
directly under the bottom rail of the fence so I've cut all that off, where it goes
up onto the over that side of the fence and I'll just have to keep an eye on
that, keep cutting it back this year and hopefully, at some point I will be
able to move a little bit of the soil and actually get those roots out. But in
the meantime I want to get my potatoes in here and I'm going to use a no dig
method of putting potatoes onto the ground and then covering them.
Ruth Stout put forward a method where you grow potatoes under hay, now I don't
have any hay and I don't have access to a regular source of hay and - oh there's
another weed root i'll get that while we're talking - so the next best
alternative that I have is grass clippings from when the grass gets cut.
Now very nicely, my neighbor gives me all their
grass clippings to use in the garden. I'm doing them a favor because they
don't know what to do with them all, they do me a favor because we don't have very
much grass here anymore so we don't have many grass clippings.
So it's a win-win situation! I'll just get these into the bag.
So what I'm going to do is get my seed potatoes straight onto this ground and to
have the best crop of potatoes that you can you need to exclude the light from
the tubers as they are growing because otherwise they will go green. So the more
that I can cover the stems as they're growing, hopefully the better crop we
should have. And excluding the light will prevent them from going green.
In previous years I have had issues when I've tried various different coverings
over my potatoes where they have got too much light in them last year I grew them
using this method so I put the potato tubers down covered them with grass
clippings I'm just kept on covering them and I had a really lovely lovely crop of
potatoes almost all I had to do was plunge my hand into through the grass
clippings and I could just pull out the potatoes which was was really nice and
again it's no work and it's no dig and then at the end of the year what I'm
left with on this bed will be a layer of grass clippings that will help prevent
the weeds coming through now it won't stop the pernicious old weeds like this
bramble I'll just have to keep cutting that back to weaken it as much as
possible but it will stop annual weeds coming through this thick layer of mulch
on it and then as that breaks down it's going
to improve this soil which means that in future years it won't look quite so like
dry rock-hard barren deserts hopefully this soil will over the years get really
nice and deep and rich as it has in the raised beds in the garden so as I go I'm
just going to check that there aren't any leaves growing up through no these
are a lot of stinging nettles a novel they help to carry on clearing these as
I go but I want to put two seed potatoes across the width of this bag and these
poor old seed potatoes are not ideal they've been sitting around they haven't
cheated but all they have done is of some of them are slightly cheated which
is where they sprout start growing others have just got very leggy but I
think they will forgive me potatoes do grow particularly well from last year's
tubers they as you can witness from potatoes popping up all over the garden
if you haven't managed to dig them all nights properly so I'm just going to
plant these about 15 to 18 inches apart
and all I'm doing is placing them on the soil and just literally placing them on
the soil because I'm going to cover that with grass any moment
now there's a concrete piece there so I'm going to bring that in a little bit
and I've got a chemitest growing here so I don't want to go too near that I'm
having front over there I've got cyclamen which was in my
parents garden so I don't want to be digging that up either so my next task
is to take the fresh grass clippings and just pile them onto the potatoes you can
hear my ducks are very keen it's coming root through this let's see if there's
anything interesting for them and I'm hoping they will leave it long enough
for me to be able to get the rest of them covered
and that's it this is all I need to do it's a six inch layer I know that my
neighbor will be mowing their lawn again here within a fortnight and then I'll
pile it up again and when I clean out the depths just because I can but it
doesn't make any difference if you don't have access to something like bedding or
straw you can just keep on piling on the grass clippings and now these will dry
fairly quickly and and form almost like a hey mat and then you can just keep on
piling them on I'm gonna go and get some more grass clippings I'll leave the
camera running I'm hoping that the Ducks will behave
so can it really be this simple yes it can
the main thing that I need to do is make sure that this doesn't get too dry in
the first few days so I will water it tonight once the Sun is going down and
I'll water it again in a couple of days time and then I will leave nature to do
her thing and as I so often say who nature just
wants to grow we can follow the progress of these potatoes throughout the growing
season but in the meantime here's a reminder of what it was like to harvest
from underneath grass clippings last year so it had peas down the center and
then potatoes on the outside of it and going to get some potatoes for our
supper
well is it pretty good so this is a Maris Piper this is a bit of harvesting
potatoes I really like when you start looking through to see what else you can
find I'm a home the top here there's a lot of grass this is what I used as a
mulch to exclude the light from the potatoes and it's worked really well and
we'll certainly be doing that again I used about two inches or more of grass
clippings and I did that a couple of times to earth the potatoes up and if
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