I know potatoes are cheap in the market. I just enjoy growing potatoes.
With all the weather pattern changes, potatoes have become a difficult crop. Spring is often too cool and wet with late frosts. Potatoes are very frost tender. Late spring is often an early summer with hot, dry weather.
This year I debated, but succumbed to temptation and planted a bed of Yukon Gold potatoes. The goats were supplying plenty of mulch.
People laugh when I say I am lazy. It’s not that really. I just don’t want to do unnecessary work and hilling potatoes comes under that category. I lay out my rows of seed potatoes and pile on six inches and more of mulch leaving it thinner, or with a channel, over the seed potatoes for easy emergence of sprouts.
With potatoes mulch serves several purposes. The usual ones of weed control and moisture retention are two. Cold, wet springs make that last a problem some years.
Another purpose for potatoes is frost control. The surface of the mulch may have frost on it, but the potatoes are safe. Any sprouts above the mulch will be nipped.
The last purpose of the mulch is easy harvest. No digging. Move the mulch aside and pick up the potatoes.
This year there is a complication. Last year I lost my potatoes to a raccoon. The raccoon wasn’t interested in the potatoes. Instead, she dug up the mulch along with the potatoes in search of worms and grubs.
The raccoon was back this spring. I’m assuming only one raccoon, but that may be wrong, probably is, and I’m not fond of shooting them for hunting for food to feed their babies.
I laid a piece of chicken wire down over my potato bed. The potatoes didn’t mind and grew up through the holes. The raccoon did mind and left them alone.
It’s now harvest time. I will pull up the wire along with the potatoes, separate them, check under the mulch for the rest of the potatoes. And plant my butternut squash.