Potato Growing 5 Ways

Potatoes are an underappreciated garden crop, yet they’re easy to plant and care for. Spuds thrive in diverse soils and climates, offer a host of beneficial nutrients, and store well. Because store-bought potatoes are cheap, many gardeners opt not to grow them, but for those who do, deciding how to manage them can be a challenge. Garden resources are full of potato growing ideas. The variety of options can be overwhelming, especially because each method has both proponents who report fantastic yields and detractors who spout stories of failure. To separate the wheat from the chaff, I organized a study to test the performance of five of the most popular potato-growing methods.

Tater-Growing Techniques

Potatoes are native to the Andes, where the Inca and their predecessors cultivated varieties in a complex environment: unpredictable El Niño-driven precipitation and starkly varied elevations with diverse ecosystems. Traditional cultivation involves digging trenches to create rows of soil and llama dung. A mix of seed potato varieties are buried with llama dung in the dug-up fill. This practice builds food security: Regardless of the season’s conditions, at least a few varieties will do well, even if others fail.

Western gardeners have adapted this approach into the trench-and-hill method. A 6-inch-deep trench is dug for each row