Purple Potato Harvest and Garlic Planting in ONE DAY!

Edible Acres is a full service permaculture nursery located in the Finger Lakes area of NY state. We grow all layers of perennial food forest systems and provide super hardy, edible, useful, medicinal, easy to propagate, perennial plants for sale locally or for shipping around the country…
Happy growing!

[tri]

Awesome video Sean, Its nearly time for me to start harvesting my sweet potatoes for curing. I used them to fill in spots that i didnt want to leave bare and it worked out great.

[jamep]

I always find your dry-farmed field videos to be especially inspirational. Borrowed land, low tech approaches, but still growing on a meaningful scale, all while improving the soil along the way. Cheers man!

[simonedwards]

Greetings from Australia! We are in Springtime and I just planted my potatoes two weeks ago. I love your videos and learn so much from them. Thank you for taking the time to run your YT channel

[rebeccaburnell]

Z4b, fairly hydrated landscape context:

I've been at my present location for 3 years, and each year I've heavily mulched another wide strip of lawn on the edge of the garden in the fall, then left it until July (adding more mulch in the spring).

In the first few days of July I pull it back, drop potatoes onto the soil surface Ruth Stout-style (I grow russets my neighbour gifted me; she's been July planting this seed stock for more than 20 years, has no name for them), and pull the mulch back over them.

The point of planting them late is to avoid dealing with striped potato beetles, which strip plants of their leaves if you plant them in the spring, here.

I add more junk hay or dried grass clippings at least once, in an effort to "hill" the potatoes, and then I harvest them mid-October. They don't get watered a single time, and the only "weeding" I do is a minor effort to pull up anything that comes through the mulch in the spring & before the potatoes grow greens.

Great harvests (& super easy and CLEAN since no-dig growing), except my plants don't want to die back before frost (my neighbour's do, planted in tilled soil - she's the one who suggested July planting, so they're the same potatoes started the same day grown 500m apart). I've been enormously pleased with their storage life despite that (they've stayed firm with no eye growth until at least March), but this year I'm experimenting with knocking down half of them 2 weeks before harvest to see if there's any difference in skin toughness/storage quality.

Great soil to plant into the next spring; basically none of the grass from the sod persists and only weed seeds from the junk hay to deal with, which lift out of my heavy mulching easily anyway.

[shimilangagardens]

I took your advice a few years ago, and I rather do like it for turning sod into bed using potatoes, followed by garlic. The back to back heavy mulch does get rid of most of the grasses. I’ve also copied your model of planting tree seeds in with the garlic, and so far so good.

[beckymay]

You were my inspiration for using potatoes to heal our hard compacted clay soil. Couldn’t get a trowel into it before. Threw potatoes on the ground, covered them with hay for the season, now the ground is soft and workable. Magical! Thank you!😊

[anthonyburdine]

Thank you for sharing so much helpful information !! 😊
QUESTION- WHEN DO YOU PULL THE GARLIC ?

[GrowCookPreserveWithKellyDawn]

Thank you for your stewardship and guidance.

[WattsMiner]

Looking really 👍 great. Potatoes always tast better grown not bought.

[CorwynGC]

Can you explain what you mean by "perennializing"?
Thank you kindly.

[paul.]

I tried All Blue and Adirondack Blue this year...they were so unproductive I'll just go back to using store bought Yukon Golds next year.

[arlisswirtanen]

Wouldn’t the timing be too early for planting garlic? I may need to try this and see how it works in my climate zone 3b.

[CharlieLemmink]

I confess I'm a little perplexed about why these particular potatoes are more perennial than other varieties (sorry, could only come up with four p-words in that sentence). Is it that they're more frost-hardy than others? Or that they grow back more easily from random pieces you forget about? Or maybe I'm just imagining that you've called these more perennial than other varieties. It just seems like you're taking the whole plant out (to of course plant more seed potatoes next year), so I'm confused about the difference. Intrigued, though, because I take all of your plant recommendations seriously!