Dig vs. No Dig: Potatoes

It’s potato planting season and this year, I’ve decided to have a little bit of an experiment to help satisfy my own curiosity.

I’m yet to go full on No Dig, but I have been doing a lot reading and for the most part it’s making total sense to do so.

The No Dig habits I have picked up have been paying dividends the most notable is keeping the beds covered to help keep the weeds down. The second being to hoe little and often, again to keep the weeds at bay.

Now I’m dipping my toes into the No Dig method for real and I thought I’d have some fun by pitting No Dig potatoes against potatoes grown in a more traditional method.

I’m not just looking at returns, I’m also looking at how convenient it is too.

The potatoes I’m growing are Maris Piper potatoes, which are a good all round potato, and are a main crop.

The first thing I did was split my potato bed into two – one side being for dig, and the other for no dig.

Growing No dig potatoes

Finally, keeping all of that cardboard from all of those online deliveries paid of.

For the no dig side, I laid down some cardboard, of which we had accumulated quite a lot over the last few weeks, and emptied a few cans of water onto the cardboard to stop it from flapping around, and to flatten it even more.

Then started to empty the compost bin on top of the cardboard. There’s no technical ability required – and it was good to get stuck in and burn some calories. I was sure to leave a border of cardboard as well to stop weeds coming through.

I then spaced out the potatoes about a trowels depth apart, and planted them about a trowels depth into the mound.

I took a lot of cues from Charles Dowding’s “How to grow potatoes without digging?” video below. It’s a fairly straight forward method to be fair and it’ll be great to see if they turn out the same (or similar). I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Growing Dig potatoes

I’m not too sure if “dig potatoes” is even a term, but we’ll just use it for the sake of this post. 🙂

I first dug a couple of deep trenches, which were about a spits depth (a spits depth is a fancy term meaning a spade deep), making mounds either side of the trenches.

Much like the no dig potatoes, I spaced them around a trowels depth apart.

I then dug a hole for each potato and planted it into the trench. I then watered each of the sides of the bed generously.

As they grow, for the no dig bed, I’ll add soil from the compost bin, and for the dig bed I’ll move earth from the sides of the mounds into the trench – and this is really to help protect the shoots from any frost damage that may occur.

The weather is still a bit on the cool side, so the likelihood of the frost causing damage is still a possibility.

And now we wait. I’ll keep you posted on developments, but in the meantime, I’d love to know if you’ve grown potatoes in different ways and how you’ve got on with them in the comments below. 🙂