The potatoes have been growing like mad since they came up through the soil. So far it looks like almost every single seed that I planted has come up. I have read that if you want to increase your potato production you should hill them up a few times over the growing season. Since our potatoes are in beds surrounded by irrigation ditches I am a little limited on space for hilling them up, so I think I will only be doing this once. They were already mulched in with straw fairly thickly so I just left that in place and added dirt on top of it. If they look like they need hilling further I will probably just fill it is as much as possible with more straw. Besides, these beds could really use some extra organic matter to improve the soil and straw fits the bill to a T. I just hope it doesn't make it too hard to dig the potatoes out of the ground once it is time to harvest. Guess I will find out in a few months.
Here are the beds before hilling them up.
Each plant is about 6-8 inches high and once they are hilled they will be covered by about 4-5 more inches of dirt, just leaving the tops of the leaves out of the soil so they can keep growing. I made sure to pull any weeds from all of the beds before I added the dirt. They would probably be nearly impossible to pull once they got buried deeper.
Here are the same beds after being hilled up.
As you can see the plants look tiny again, but all that extra dirt means more stem space for growing potatoes. This year might be our largest harvest yet.
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