Lawn Removal Through Potatoes - Beautiful Harvest!

back in the spring we planted potatoes out in three different styles and i made a video describing that experiment i'll link to that here for an introduction and so now here we are in later august early september the potatoes are dying back enough that we'd like to do a harvest on them so we can moon move over to some other crops and so we're going through we've got one two three crates to document the three different styles let's explain how it's going one thing i want to be really clear about is to set expectations appropriately if what you're interested in is really specific numbers and science and data this won't be the video for you there's lots of other folks that have made videos weighing everything but it's not our style to actually weigh as we go so this would be a qualitative analysis of how it all worked so hopefully that's still compelling and useful to you we started our harvest in row three and if you remember from the initial experiment the third option here was basically the most passive in the spring this was just a lawn and so what we did is we laid down some hay here when we were ready to plant we moved the hay aside and every foot or two we just dropped a single seed potato we probably put in about 20 or so seed potatoes move the hay right back on top and then throughout the season added a little compost a little bit of soil a little bit of hay but in a drought year the yield from 20 or so seed potatoes dropped on a lawn with some hay banked around them is this lots more potatoes a decent decent result each potato begot between three and five more potatoes and some of them are really beautiful some of them have some markings here there one thing we found pretty definitively with this third method is that some of the plantings had green shoulders on the potatoes in other words they were not deep enough they did not have enough coverage and they became green and so those potatoes were going to end up actually just composting they're not useful to us as food they're not useful to the chickens they're just on the edge but it seems worth better to build soil with these chop them up and let them rot than to try to eat them somehow so that was definitely an issue with the just mulch on grass one thing that's pretty stunning about this is that the between the potatoes the mulch that went down a little bit of compost some subsoil from when we were digging a pond i mean like really low quality subsoil and in fairness a incredibly punishingly dry year all those variables aside this planting method all the planting methods just about completely erased the vegetation that was here the grass is just about gone in fact here's a spot we we're using a shovel to dig these out mainly so we get more decompaction but this was sod in april these root systems are just about completely dead there's just some moss in there mainly it's earthworms that have been eating the roots and the shoots of the grass so if we came through here with a broad fork and transplanted out other crops into here we'd have beautiful soil nearly completely weed free and lots of mulch right around to break down so if only to plant the potatoes as a leveraging mechanism that in one season to erase a lawn and make beautiful garden beds they're worthwhile yield completely aside but this is definitely way better than putting down silage tarp or clear greenhouse poly to kill a field we're actually going to be able to eat what we got out of this and we use no plastic to get there it's also pretty interesting to see i mean you can here's a example of the management for the season basically it looks like we put concrete on here this was from soil six seven feet down in the earth as we were digging the pond we had nowhere to put it so put some around each of these potatoes some compost and the like but you see what happens is you get down in there we can get in there and do a fair bit of the harvest with just our fingertips so these beautiful potatoes are basically popping right out of what was a lawn in april and the deeper we went with soil even poor quality soil definitely there was a correlation that the potatoes got bigger and that's pretty neat there's probably about four or five more in there this is from the middle method which i'll talk about next and planting option two which to my mind was fingers crossed was going to be the best we put hay on the grass later on when we were ready to plant potatoes we moved the hay aside dropped the potato so all the exact same as that third method but we put compost on top to give them a head start and that little addition of compost seemed to yield quite a bit more potato and much larger ones and here's just a sample it looks like a nest of potatoes this back in the spring was just a single seed potato and each one of them be got about this much of a multiplication sometimes we used a larger seed potato but really nice yield there for having no water and just some rotting hay concrete aggregate one little layer of compost but once these are all harvested and all the stems and the few bits of weeds the very few the two percent of weeds that remain the broad forking that we do through here should get this into a bed that's just exquisitely beautiful for a fall crop row two is harvested and it feels pretty definitive that it is an improvement over row three so on the left you can see where the mulch was pulled aside potato dropped compost added and then the rest was the same treatment and this one com mulch pulled aside dropped on the grass mulch put back no compost so that little bit of additional compost by two gallons of compost added at each planting spot i would say rough estimate has doubled two and a half times the yield or so there were next to no green shouldered potatoes there were one or two that had damage or some rot on them i suspect they had vole damage i think what happened is in the center row because the mulch was so deep maybe it promoted more vole habitat and so a few got hit but even with that we're looking at oh there's one that got hit by the shovel we're accruing more and more for dinner tonight lots of beautiful ones in here and overall quite happy so the last row is where we actually dug down flipped the sod over and planted in the soil before we did the rest fingers crossed that's not the best method because that's the most work but so far very little work to get these to this stage that is for sure okay the whole bed is lifted and i've got three crates with the three different tests represented and it turned out to be what i had both hoped for and had kind of expected and what i think a lot of folks called and that is that the middle option of directly on the grass with some compost and good mulch is the nicest now some other folks out there have commented well it's not a fair test because in the middle it's furthest from grass pressure there's more mulch in the middle all of those are valid arguments and that's why i'm suggesting this isn't a scientific experiment this is just empirical and what are we seeing and so we've got type number one dig in the ground plant it in the ground put the mulch back and then hill throughout the season pretty poorly as we did now interestingly here we saw a lot more with discoloration i'm not sure was it too wet in the ground earlier in the season that direct contact with the wet soil and i was surprised to see more green shoulders on these which normally indicates more exposure to sunlight some decent some nice ones here there but not really stunning in the quality of the potato and certainly not an overwhelming volume in total put it right on the grass put some compost and keep mulching that is the future for all of this in my mind probably about twice as much of the other options or about as much as those other two combined and then laid on the grass with just some mulch i think it needed the composting boost to really get that head start and so in the future this is what we'll lean into more some takeaways that i think are worth noting by and large we used whole seed potato we did not cut the potato and sprout it in advance and i think that probably reduced virus or fungal pressure a bit if you're going to do such a rough process like we're doing here it seems like whole potato seed is worthwhile and probably it would have been well worth my while to heal them more and with actual compost or actual quality soil not rough subsoil but even still we got some good material out i would guess we put in around 10 or 15 pounds of seed i guess there's well over 100 pounds of potato in total which for a five foot by thirty foot bed in what was a wet lawn this spring i'm pleased as punch no plastic no irrigation during a drought summer no fertilizer just waste hay half finished compost and some clay rocky subsoil a few times throughout the season and then dig them up put them in a root cellar and enjoy them in the winter this feels like a really legit pathway for flipping a lawn into productive garden space in year one with hand tools and potatoes we'll let these surface dry a little bit we'll bring them into the garage and then check them over for quality again and organize the ones that need to be eaten first put them in their own container the ones that are structurally really sound and really firm they go in a container for deep storage in the root cellar pick out little nibblings like this that we cut and set them aside for dinner and we'll get this broad forked next for today i'm going to mulch this to make sure it doesn't dry out we'll broad fork it and then into this bed we plan to transplant mainly kale that will grow for us but also to feed our chickens so next video on this will probably be completely lush with green or completely nibbled to the ground by groundhogs and deer that remains to be seen but thanks for watching i hope you're growing lots of food where you live if you can and if you've got a lawn still think about flipping it can you turn it into something other than a lawn i bet you can potatoes might help you on that path take care oops did a bad job

Channel: EdibleAcres

Views: 28,287

Rating: 4.9669695 out of 5

Keywords: ruth stout, mulch potatoes, no dig potatoes, lawn removal, mulching a lawn, converting a lawn to garden, permaculture potatoes, permaculture

Id: FdzXvZ6Pv3s

Length: 12min 57sec (777 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/StinkyMcD]

Awesome experiment. I’m going to try this next Spring. Beats digging out sod!

[u/daring_leaf]

Saving this for next year!