Our EXPERIMENT Worked! Getting Serious about Growing Potatoes.

hi everybody and welcome to living traditions homestead well it's about ninety days after we planted this raised bed garden full of potatoes seed potatoes so we are definitely within the right time frame that they should be done and we can start harvesting them now this was an impromptu last minute raised bed this winter we kind of had a freakout moment about food security with all the craziness that has been going on in our country in our world and we felt we really needed to plant a lot of potatoes this year we have not had very good luck planting potatoes in the past and we've just continued to rely on the grocery store for potatoes but we wanted to plant as many potatoes as we could but we also wanted to learn from our mistakes in the past the major thing that we have learned here is that weeds just completely overrun our Gardens here in southern Missouri we have like super weeds I think so we wanted to try something different and plant potatoes in raised bed gardens so let's go take a look at this raised bed and I'll show you what we did and how it worked so we built this raised bed specifically to try growing potatoes in this year and this bed is 24 feet long and four feet wide and about 12 inches deep we filled it with composted mulch which looks like it has stayed pretty nice little loose so I do think digging these is going to be fairly easy but we did put the woven ground cover at the bottom so that weeds won't grow up right through the compost that part of it has gone very well we had don't have any weeds in here at all which is awesome what we don't know is whether or not we have potatoes in here either the plants didn't grow as big as I would have hoped or that as much as I would have liked so we won't know until we start digging today whether or not we have many potatoes in here or not there's only one way to find out and that's to start digging the potatoes that we planted in this raised bed are Kennebec potatoes and they're a variety that's supposed to do well in our climate so let's start digging and I have to be a little careful because we do have the woven ground cover underneath here I don't want to hit that with the potato for [Music] okay this one has a few more [Music] but they're not very big [Music] [Music] well that's the first row we got that was for plants and we ended up with 2 4 6 8 9 potatoes so from the first floor plants we got 9 potatoes not totally bad they're not very big but I think it's a good start let's see if we get 9 potatoes off every row in this garden that'll end up being a quite a few potatoes let's see how many more we can get [Music] [Music] we've completed the digging of half of the garden and this is what we have so far in this garden I'm happy that we didn't get completely skunked now the second half of this raised bed garden was part of an experiment actually this half we planted with pieces of seed potatoes each having you know at least one or two eyes on the piece the other half we had full potatoes that we planted we were gonna see if the plants were bigger if they produce more potatoes when we planted this garden though we didn't realize that there was going to be such a difference in the amount of sunshine sunlight between this half of the garden and that half of the garden we have some trees on the other side of us here that pretty much provides shade during a good part of the day it was winter when we planted this and the trees didn't have any leaves so we didn't realize that was gonna be a problem so that's something for us to consider and fix for the next year but it may also have a difference on this half of the garden that we're gonna harvest next because they had more sunshine we don't know let's find out [Music] well I've got the entire bed got all of the potatoes harvested and you can see the difference in the two halves of the bed this was the first half we did that we planted that partial potatoes and it got a lot of shade this is the half where we planted the whole potatoes and it got mostly Sun now I'm not sure which of those variables made the big difference if I had to guess I would say probably the Sun that these got a lot more Sun because you can see we've got at least double maybe even more than double the amount of potatoes off this half and the potatoes on this half are I mean considerably bigger so I would say definitely it's better to be growing these potatoes in a sunny spot which is great because the other two beds that we still have to dig up are in full Sun all the time and we're gonna get these gathered up we're going to take these in the house and then we'll come back out and we're going to dig up those other two beds we're over by our second raised bed garden where we planted potatoes now this one we did differently than we did the first one instead of putting woven grown cover down and then putting the soil on top because this was already an existing bed we actually laid down the woven ground cover burned holes and planted our seed potatoes right through the holes so that they grow up through the holes the intention our intention by doing this was to keep the weed pressure down from the potato plants and it looks like it's worked they've definitely grown up nicely and really I think this bed looks better than the one we just dug up well I'll keep in mind that this soil underneath here is way different than what we used on the other raised bed it has topsoil mixed with composted mulch and we've been using this bed for four years now at least four years this spring we were going to take these raised beds apart and just completely till them under not use them because we've just had so much weed pressure in these raised bed gardens but because we just felt desperate to plant as many potatoes as we had room for we decided to keep these one more plant potatoes in them and see what happened so that's where we're at we planted potatoes in full Sun and we think so far they've been doing great so what we're going to do now is we need to obviously pull up the woven ground cover before I can start digging these up so we go around I'm going to take out the staples we only put staples around the edge and then I think I'm going to be able to pull this right up if not we'll need to come through and we'll need to cut each one of the plants so that the top parts are off and we can pull the weed fabric over but I'm hoping that we don't have to do that and then I can just pull hard enough to get these through most of these activities today is just too much for me to help with I'm three weeks now post up from having major surgery I had a hysterectomy and we still need to be safe for three to five more weeks so as much as I would love to be doing all of this because this is one of my favorite things to do is to work out in the gardens I just need to be safe and let Kevin do most of the work all the staples are out now it's just a matter of seeing if I can pull this off I think it might be easier to cut the plants first now I do want to leave enough of the plant so we know where where to dig you where we should expect to find potatoes so don't want to cut it right off at the ground all right we got those all cut let's try pulling the weed fabric off again that's better all right I'm gonna truth we're going to start digging now we haven't watered this bed in about a week because you're not supposed to water prior to harvest so this ground is potentially gonna be pretty hard so we'll see how this goes oh it's not too bad now some little ones oh look at that Wow those are some nice potatoes that looks great sure we didn't miss it now you have to be a little careful when you're digging because the skins on these potatoes when you're first digging them up are so delicate so far I am extremely pleased with the way this is going look at the size of that potato and got several of them that says already [Music] when we planted these gardens that are covered with the woven weed fabric several of you were very concerned that the potatoes would grow on top of the ground or would somehow be exposed to just the woven weed fabric and they would turn green because of the tiny little holes in the woven weed fabric now we have one potato that's kind of protruding from the ground here and actually a second one here and oh and actually a third one and you can see that even though they're peeking out they're not turning green at all so that's not a worry if you're wanting to try this method next year [Music] [Music] well the final role and as you can see I'm about ready to be done even though we have one raised bed left that one's going to wait till evening time but I'm excited to get this bed done and show you guys how many we've ended up with [Music] look at that that is an awesome potato [Music] I would say so far this mix of the half compost half just topsoil it is producing some awesome potatoes better than the bed over there that was just all compost [Music] [Music] well this is what we got out of just this garden these are both half bushels so almost a bushel of potatoes which is fantastic I think so far this is the best garden we've had we'll see when we get to the last one but I need to go in and cool down for a while see you guys back out here in a few hours well we didn't make it back out last night instead the girls and I decided to go blackberry picking and ended up with almost another two gallons of blackberries so that was an awesome harvest but today we need to finish up these potatoes so it's the next morning it's still nice and cool out which is even better and we're gonna try to get this last better potatoes done so we can tell you guys the final weigh-in of how many potatoes these three raised beds produce now our family uses anywhere between 120 to 200 pounds of potatoes each year so it'll be interesting to see how close we can get to that and even if we don't hit that 120 to 200 pound mark it will really give us a good idea of how much more we need a plant next year in order to try to get to that goal of one year of potatoes for our family we're do the same thing we did yesterday because that worked out well I'm just going to go through and cut the tops of the plants off and then we'll peel the weed fabric back [Music] [Music] that's a nice one [Music] [Music] here's what we ended up with from the third bad I'm pretty happy with that now this bed was a little smaller than the last so I did expect less potatoes but this it's still a nice basket of potatoes I'm gonna take these in the house and weigh them come back out and share with you guys the final result of how many potatoes we got so this is everything that we ended up getting you guys from the three raised beds we weighed these and the final total was 91 and a half pounds of potatoes so I think that that is awesome not quite as many as we wanted but that just means next year we'll need to add another bed it seemed like we got on average you know between 25 and 30 pounds per bed so I'm real happy with that now this is a lot of potatoes to deal with the first thing that we need to do is to lay them all out in a cool shady place we're actually going to lay these out just sing in a single layer in the house on counters and tables and everywhere else we can to let them cure now after these cure we'll probably go through and look for the biggest ones and we'll keep those out for fresh eating I mean we'll eat some along the way as the curing - we actually had four of them last night for dinner and they were awesome baked potatoes but the smaller ones and the ones that we don't think that we're going to be able to eat right away we're actually going to can right here in southern Missouri it's hard for us to get these to last through the winter without them going bad it's very humid here it stays warm with a lot of bugs we have a lot of bugs and so if you I mean if you figure it's really the middle of July we've got a long time before it gets cold here before even a root cellar would get cool enough to keep these guys from getting bugs and getting soft and yucky so like Kevin said we're gonna can most of what we can't eat fresh within the time frame that they'll start going bad so as Sarah said our family typically eats between 10 and 20 pounds of potatoes a month in the summer obviously laughs in the wood we do more with Supes and the holidays come around and eat more that way so you know 91 pounds isn't going to get us through an entire year but it's better than half and see we yet another thing that we can mark off that list that we don't need to buy very much at the grocery store and we're super thankful and feel so blessed to have these yes we've learned a lot this year prior years we've been really discouraged and haven't gotten great harvests and just have been discouraged by all of the weeds so in our previously we D raised beds using the woven weed fabric was a huge success we've also learned a lot from the new raised bed that we started how to make that better and an even more productive raised bed for potatoes next year yeah if you guys have raised beds that you just can't keep up with the weeds I highly recommend trying to grow potatoes in those with the woven grown cover on top I think that it really was a lifesaver for us this year we could have never kept up with all of the weeds that would have been up in those and then digging these would have been just a nightmare plus the potatoes won't have grown as big with all of that weed pressure right so overall we are very pleased we did several different experiments with these potatoes this year I think every one of them was a success and really gave us more to build on more knowledge for the future so you guys we need to get these potatoes inside out of the Sun have them start curing in the house we really are thankful that you guys have spent the day with us and that you enjoy spending time with us as we are really living our dream out here as homesteaders if you're enjoying our videos make sure that you hit the subscribe button below and you know the best way that you can help us is to share our videos especially on your social media until next time thanks so much for stopping by our homestead take care and God bless god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 481,739

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, organic gardening, grow your own, how to grow poatoes

Id: nTyEI9SP2_E

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020