the potato

We have grown potatoes for years, always do objectively well. For 2026 we chose to make a change and plant into weed cloth for a few reasons. Weed cloth will keep input labor to an absolute minimum once the bed is established and planted. For this season we have chosen to plant several varieties, some new and some old. We saved some purple, pink, bicolor, and a banana fingerling potato from the 2025 grow season. These were saved in a cool storage through winter with eyes showing.

Early April we started the first bed, tilled thoroughly and installed weed fabric with a size of 3’x100’. This first bed was planted with Purple Viking(organic) and partially hilled. Potatoes were cut and planted to 6 inches deep roughly with a 10 pound bag seeding the entire bed at 8-10” spacing. Spacing may be closer than some like but we hope the width of the bed and being weed free allows the highest yield on the close spacing. Mid April beds 2 and 3 were then planted. Bed 2 was planted with makah ozette and harvest moon, both shipped from burpee with 10 tubers each. These were cut and planted to roughly 30’ each of bed 2, the remainder was planted with tubers saved from 2025 season. Bed 3 was then planted a week after that towards the end of April with 10 pounds of huckleberry gold(organic) which filled 90’ of the bed, then the remainder was finished with leftover 2025 tubers as well.

All holes in fabric were made in an x shape with the planted tuber set straight below the center. By May bed 1 has poked through entirely and both of the later bed have shown some sprouts just below the surface. We had a frost and the weed fabric surprisingly saved all growth on bed 1 with only minimal damage to a few leaves. We have a bed of purple potatoes planted elsewhere on the property we will call bed 4, used as a control. Bed 4 was planted at the same time as bed 1, no weed cloth but standard tilled bed and no extras. This bed had 4-6 inches of growth like bed 1 and was frost completely back to the soil line, now a week later just barely showing replacement sprouts coming back.

For this season we will be testing out the weed cloth, determining the varieties we want to continue with, and also winter of 26/27 starting true potato seeds sourced from cultivariable. We hope with lessons learned this season to have the most productive season ever in 2027.