Lazy Potatoes | The Easy Way to Grow Potatoes | No Dig, No Compost, Easy Harvest!

hello did you know there's a really easy way to grow potatoes without digging trenches and without earthing them up i'm liz zorab and this is by the farm this morning i'm planting two lots of sea potatoes i've got a variety called rocket and another variety called pentland javelin now penton javelin i grow every year and rocket is a new one for me but lots of people have told me how lovely it is what you'll need to plant your potatoes using this method is fairy gloves they're not essential but i choose to wear them you'll need your seed potatoes um something to mark out a straight line if you want to use a straight line and then some hay or some grass clippings so i'm starting by marking out the line where i want the potatoes to grow so once i've uh marked a line of approximately where i want them to grow it really is as simple as placing potatoes onto the ground now you can put newspaper down first cut small holes in it and put potatoes through that but you don't need to i've got plenty of space here so i'm actually planting my potatoes quite far apart a foot apart will work so 30 centimetres and um you can choose to chit chat potatoes or not now chitting is the process of standing potatoes in a cool light place and allowing them to develop small shoots they should be small and dark and healthy if you get very long spindly white shoots simply isn't enough light for them so you need to increase their light you can see this section here is where i've previously mucked out the duck house and popped the muckings out here that's absolutely fine just pushing the potatoes through that so they're sitting on the ground and the important thing with this method is that your potatoes are actually on soil or on compost so you can choose to put a row of compost onto the ground and i've done that before just put down a small thin row of chopped pork compost embedded the potatoes into that that's worked very well but also it's worked equally well just leaving them sitting on the ground potatoes will put down roots go into the soil and grow away nicely to turn this into a little bit of an experiment i'm going to do one half of each type of sweet potato covered in only hay and the other half covered only in used animal bedding and then obviously for the other variety i'll do one half a and one half animal bedding and we'll see at the end of the year when we harvest them if that's actually made any difference at all or whether the harvest actually is only impacted by the quality of the soil that the potato roots are going into and then as we get grass clippings i'll add those on top and the point of adding hay or grass clippings on top is to exclude the light from the tubers as the new ones are developing and it will do a couple more things uh if your potatoes are a variety that's a an indeterminate variety so it grows up and the tubers will grow all off the stems then the more contact the stem has with a medium it can grow in the more tubers you're likely to get it can prevent wind rock protect from frost conserve moisture actually mulching around your potatoes is just an all-round really good idea so i'm just going to get the rest of my seed potatoes down and then i'm going to cover them in 2020 i grew my potatoes and a mixture of grass clippings and used poultry bedding and that worked really well got very very good yield from that [Music] oh yeah [Music] i won't throw them in i've lifted one plant and i can see about 15 potatoes about the size of an egg all right and they're about the size of an egg 15. yeah how about this sauce oh oh look at that now this yeah this is amazing liz oh wow so this cane uh marks the divide between the two varieties and let's go to about halfway here somewhere one two three four five six seven eight nine so this is halfway here and i'll pop a cane in to guide me uh where those need to go you don't need to do this when you're growing potatoes under hay or under grass clippings this is purely for a bit of fun so i can remove my guide rope now because the potatoes are all sewn so i'm putting on a layer that's about well as i'm putting it on it's about four to six inches thick but uh there's a lot of air in it i'm shaking it so that it's not in very tight clumps and this will flatten down quite quickly and then i'll come and cover it again with another layer the next half is much more hard work i've actually got to go and clean out the duck shelter and to get the animal bedding just a quick reminder that if you have chickens you can use chicken bedding but you will need to leave it to mature for about 12 to 18 months chicken manure is very hot and can scorch the plants that you're growing in it unless you leave it to settle mature and start composting down and then it's absolutely great material for growing in if you've got rabbits or hamsters you can use their bedding immediately and likewise if you have ducks you can use that straight away as well the animal bedding uh comprises mostly hay um but it's also got duck poop on it and it's been in uh that field shelter since the autumn this is a little harder to fluff up as i'm going along because it's got duck poop holding it together well that didn't take too long so now what i've got now is the two varieties rocket and pentland javelin and half of each of those is covered in hay and the other half is covered in used duck bedding and which is also mostly hay so we'll come back when i start harvesting these potatoes and i can show you just how well this method works for growing your potatoes without compost i've also done experiments looking at some of the best mulches for using on your potatoes back in april i started my no-dig potato trial and what i wanted to see is whether the mulch or the covering over the seed potatoes would make a difference uh to the yield of the potatoes now obviously this is not a highly scientific experiment this was done in my garden as a home trial so i planted a row of all the same variety i split them into four sections with three potatoes in each section and each section i covered with the different coverings and the link on screen here will take you straight through to that video

Channel: Liz Zorab - Byther Farm

Views: 927,234

Keywords: liz zorab, Lazy potatoes, The Easy Way to Grow Potatoes, No Compost, no dig potatoes, how to grow potatoes, easy harvest, growing potatoes, homesteading, potato growing, byther farm, The Lazy Way to Grow Potatoes, permaculture, gardening, how to, how to grow, gardening tips, how to grow organic vegetables, potato growing tips, no dig gardening, no till gardening, gardening - topic, home grown veg, Organic gardening, no dig, self sufficiency, self sufficient

Id: atcXuRijMtM

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022