layered potato bed idea

[JRinPA]

Okay so I have tried lined wash baskets and big plastic towers and a built up walled hill 20" high and 10" raised bed and in-ground with or without hilling and some in grow bags on the ground. Last year my experiment was in ground set a few inches below grade, plus some more potatoes set right at grade (staggered off the initial planting) and then all hilled over with compost. Between sweet corn that was already up. And that worked pretty well.

Anything between raised bed and in ground seems to work well enough. Bags, no, pots, no, barrels, no, wash baskets, no, walled hill, no. Voles took over that walled hill like it was 476AD. They chewed through some of the grow bags set on the ground. Wash baskets are for clothing...they dry out real quick and are UV killed by the end of the season. Bags and stuff are easy harvest but just too dry, without the roots getting down into the ground.

So, in-ground or raised it is..."but wait, there's more!" As Seen On YT! This year I saw a youtube about using cardboard boxes. Just regular cardboard shipping boxes, about 8" tall. Fold top and bottom in to make it topless, bottomless, and double thickness, set that on ground (I would work it first), set a seed potato or two on the ground, cover with some dirt and compost, then straw above it. And wait for the sprouts to grow. Then "hill it" some more with straw, just right in the box. All the potatoes will set in the box, no digging. All the hill material will stay in the box, no blowing away of straw, or hill erosion. That was this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YouHvONe8bI

Sounds neat, but I guarantee if I did that, there would be voles inside those boxes soon enough. I don't have backyard coyotes or a whole field of potatoes for voles feed on. But, to defend against voles, I think setting the box on a 1/2" hw cloth bottom would stop them. The plants will root down right through the wire, but the potatoes will set at seed level or above, so in the box. Kinda bend the hw cloth edges up, so that the vole will naturally go under. I doubt they would want to walk on top when they can easily tunnel under...they aren't those DC rats! At worse, if they did get in the box, the hole would be visible. I'm also going to set snap traps in pipes across the rows next to the boxes. .

Question, why bother with boxes if in-ground works great?
Answer, to double deck the row.
It worked last year for me, two levels in ground. But they were all the same type and I still had to dig them all at the same time, late August. So, I plan to do a normal planting of Lehigh a few inches under grade plus hilled a bit, where they are pretty safe from voles. Then, place the boxes in the same row, but between those sets, and plant early potatoes in them. First early, second early, whatever the Brits call them. I like their words better.

So the first early potatoes in boxes should be done a month or so earlier than my "maincrop" Lehighs. The boxes will be a very easy harvest, or even to "grabble", and I don't believe they would affect the later Lehigh harvest very much at all, since they are growing in a totally different level. The boxes would be removed that last month of in ground growth.

What say you? Go ahead, shoot it to pieces. I'm diggin it!

[Whwoz]

Sounds very interesting @JRinPA . No dig potatoes work, have done them before with success, only stopped due to cost of alfalfa hay that was part of the method used. One advantage of this method is that planting and harvesting would be a lot easier on the back.

[Paulf]

I have also tried several methods and revert to in-ground growing after each attempt at the latest, greatest does not work. I dig a trench about a foot or eighteen inches deep, put in a little compost layer, put in the seed potatoes and cover with a layer of straw (cheaper than alfalfa or hay). A thin layer of compost to hold down the straw. As the potatoes sprout more straw and thin layer of compost. After the plants bloom I just wait and either harvest new potatoes or wait longer for larger ones.

We have voles but they must be eating other things than potatoes…however every time sweet potatoes are attempted the biggest becomes vole hotels and the rest get munched on all summer. I wonder if the hardware cloth lining the entire trench and lapping over the top would keep the voles out?

[rdback]

@JRinPA I saw and read about the box potato approach this Spring as well, and thought I might give it a try. Then, I did a little more reading and found it difficult to find very many HAPPY box growers. Most were very disappointed with production. I think I'll just stick to in-ground myself.

@Paulf Great minds think alike! Several years ago, I covered the bottom of a raised bed with hardware cloth, then planted sweet potatoes. The hardware cloth kept the voles out of the box, but they still feasted on sweet potatoes. They ate any and all sweet potato that grew through the wire, lol. If you look close, you can see the outline of the hardware cloth on the potato.

Sweet Potato - Vole.JPG

[bower]

It sounds interesting and why not try it? See if root access to the ground is enough to balance above ground dryness.
Here cardboard could be iffy because in wet weather boxes will fall apart. But maybe could be reinforced with some twine.

Voles here last season were just small enough to get through chicken wire and laugh about it. Hardware cloth is in my mind, so it's nice to hear about solutions and how to place it. Our voles seemed to be great climbers, but I'm not sure if they would scale a cardboard box easily.

[JRinPA]

I feel like if I dug a deep hole and back filled it with soft layers like PaulF the voles would just destroy everything. Get in there and setup house and never need to leave it. They did that in the sweet potato box, I had wire across the bottom and around it. Somehow they got in anyway. I think they climbed the sweet potato vines. I always think of that big fail as the fall of Jericho, some sweets had a grudge and were a fifth column letting down ropes to climb the walls.

We need a cat door for the fence at the comm garden. The biggest vole problems are definitely near the end of the season, when numbers have multiplied twice and it is getting cool. I never see cats come in...really no comfortable way for them to do so.

I'm leaning toward doing some potatoes at home on the 30ft raised bed. That will be regular and sweet. I could do the boxes there but it would be a long reach for groundwater access from the surface. I figured a better bet for the boxes would be right on an in-ground row at the comm garden.

Regarding the yield, I've never grown early potatoes, so if I only grow them in boxes, I won't be able to compare it to a baseline. I guess I'd have to grow some Lehigh in boxes for that.

I started saving the eyes and stalk growth this past week, when making fries. Cooking about 3/4 of the potato and keeping 1/4 for seed. I'm ready to get them out...last year my first planting was two weeks from now. I checked the raised bed temp yesterday, 43F at 4" at 3pm.