Advice for “hilling” potatoes

[chrysanthemum]

Here’s my first attempt at a small potato patch in Texas.  (I think I took this photo just yesterday morning.  We actually had rain and hail last night, and there were some lost leaves and one broken stem when I checked the garden, but things looked great.  I’m not sure that I would have know about the hail if it hadn’t been for the pounding on the roof and windows in the night.). Suberized seed potatoes went into the ground two weeks later than I had planned because of the surprising big winter storm that descended on our area in the middle of February, but they are growing nicely.  I amended the bed with compost as well as with some homemade slow-release fertilizer that we use (cottonseed meal mostly), so I think it’s good nutritionally.

I was reading heavyhitterokra’s thread on potatoes where he talked about his neighbor using a corral of cattle panels and putting potatoes on the ground and covering them with straw.  Macmex said he has used a variety of mulches with good result, so I was hoping to get some advice on what to use above my potatoes.

I have more aged manure compost stored up, and I can use it, but I have a ton of other stuff too. Here’s a list:

Cedar mulch (aged a season or two, not decomposed)
Shredded oak leaves (also aged a season or two, just piled in a fenced corner to be accessed as needed)
 
To-be-shredded winter-killed rosemary and other perennials
To-be-shredded winter-killed palm fronds
(To be shredded indicates that these are items we have just finished cutting and have piled near the garden, and my husband plans to attack the piles on Saturday morning.)
 
I know the potatoes need to be kept under cover to be protected from sunlight, and I also want to work to keep my soil from drying out and heating up so fast, especially with the two-week delay in planting.  I was thinking that perhaps since I’ve already used compost when I planted the potatoes, that I could forego it or use only a light topdressing, followed by some shredded leaves, and topped by cedar mulch as that’s probably the most effective moisture-retainer I’ve got. 

The other consideration is that I do want to plant in this bed later in the summer once the potatoes are harvested.  I think the plan is for watermelon in that spot.  I wouldn’t mix in the mulch.  I try to leave it on top as much as possible or pull it back to plant.  

I know people use palm ash for fertilizer.  We don’t use ash of any sort here because our native soil is so alkaline that we have to push the other way, and we had to add sulfur to this bed before the potatoes.   If unburnt palm fronds are some great source of nutrition, we’ll do our best to shred and use them, though.  We want to do something better than hauling them to the landfill, so we’ll put them on our land somewhere if we can get them to a form that isn’t a fire hazard.  I’ve mostly ignored the palm trees that came with our house.  Now all of a sudden I have piles and piles of fronds.

I’d love any suggestions or advice about my options.  Thank you.

[macmex]

I believe your thoughts are right on target. I would say you probably can't use too much mulch on potatoes. Our rule of thumb, when planting them, is to lay them on freshly cultivated soil and BURY them so deeply in mulch that it seems they'll never manage to find the surface. They always do, and by the time we harvest, that mulch is only a couple inches deep. 

[chrysanthemum]

Thank you both.

I began the process of adding material today and will work more on it tomorrow. The forecast was for over 80 degrees today with lots of sunshine, so I planned to water this morning and wanted to get some of the extra material added when I would already be adding moisture. I remembered that there is an area on the property somewhat near my garden that we chose as the first ever place to spread mulch and leaf mold. It’s under a large live oak and has a lovely assortment of mountain laurels near it. We haven’t added material there in at least three years, so what is on the surface is nicely broken down. I didn’t want to take too much from the area, and I had to hand pick a lot of limestone rocks out of the shovelfuls I scooped, but I moved three buckets of well-decomposed mulch to start things off. Tomorrow I’ll move some newer mulch that we put around the garden fence to make it available (and to bury the fencing a little) and see how high I can go in the raised bed. I’ll need to leave the olla lids clear for filling.

[chrysanthemum]

My husband and I added more mulch yesterday.  I didn’t realize the forecast for wind at the time, but we started getting really high winds overnight, and it’s continuing today.  I had expected to leave seedlings out overnight, but they came inside last night, and haven’t even gone out today.  The wind is blowing hard, hard, hard.  I’m glad the potatoes have a little extra support.  (We also put stakes and twine around the asparagus bed so that should provide a little protection.)

Here’s a photo of the newly mulched potatoes.  It’s amazing how much they have grown in less than one week.

[chrysanthemum]

I mentioned our potatoes dying back in a different thread, and that got me thinking that I ought to update this one.  There’s still life in the vines, but I had injured a couple when my son and I installed a trellis the other week to help support our shade cloth/hail protection.  One of those in particular was beginning to rot, so I wanted to find out what was happening underneath the soil.  I decided that I wanted new potatoes with onions and green peas with butter and cream for lunch.  My five year old got to help me gather a few of the potatoes, and it was like finding buried treasure for both of us.  The potatoes were all healthy.

Here’s a photo of our pickings (which was really too many for lunch) as well as a shot of the vines after we had removed the truly dead ones.  I think the photo makes them look a bit greener than they really are.  The top of the photo is where we grubbed around.