No Till Potatoes

Will this really work? No till article.Get some straw throw it in the yard and then stick seed potatoes in it. Keep it damp, rain should be enough and then harvest potatoes in a few weeks. This seems to easy but I’m going to try a few bales of straw and newspapers this year. Some pictures of this method can be found here.

I’ve started my own potato patch for next spring. Four bales of hay at $5 each and four kinds of potatoes from RH Shumway. Yukon Golds, White Superior, Red Pontiac and Blue Russian $26.90. Potatoes at the local Price Rite are $2 for five pounds. So to break even I’ll need to gather 117.25 pounds of edible potatoes and then eat them. This could be very tough for three people to do, I don’t know how much we consumed last year but I don’t think we had twenty three five pound bags go through this house, that would be just under a bag every two weeks.
From some of what I have been reading you can expect five to six potatoes per plant. This might be two to three pounds per plant, I think I will have around twenty to thirty plants and I think I’m in trouble already.
$20+$26.90=$46.90
$46.90/$2.00=23.45
23.45×5= 117.25 pounds of potatoes.
At $2.50 a pound (this weeks Price Chopper price 1/8/2012) I only need to eat 93.5 pounds of potatoes.

If I could find some place that sold potatoes at $4.00 per five pound bag, I can beat that price easily and I think we do eat ten pounds in a year. At $5.00 per five pounds I’ll be making money hand over fist.

June 17th