Look potatoes are so easy to grow...take a handful of peels and toss them in the compost pile or flower bed and they grow...Do the best you can for them....put down your paper or cover, add some dirt/mulch whatever you have and then your patatoes and cover and keep covering as long as you have stuff to cover with....I did exactly the thing I have described and they are growing like crazy...every day or two I go out and throw another shovel of dirt/compost on top of them...

I'll link to pictures of my potatoes that I took for a newbie on another board...

Here is a link that might be useful: spuds

Thank you so much! I'm gonna be planting potatoes this evening. I appreciate the pep talk. It's easy to overthink the whole garden, and if I didn't check in with folks once in a while, I would never get anything planted!

So, paper (actually old paper bags instead of newspaper), a sprinkling of dirt and peat, aand then some compost and leaves. I'll get hay later if I can. What fun!

Thanks again,
Emmie

Remember that the better the bed is the better your plant and yield so as I said...do the best you can and you will end up with potatoes...It's always better to have a wonderful deep compost rich nutrient filled bed but most of us are just struggling to have beds at all and we have to start somewhere...I say do the best you can and you will be building your beds as you use them.

I can see exactly what you mean. I had a bag of lobster compost, some peat moss, and some garden soil removed from the last rose bush to go in the ground. I mixed all of that up and put it on the bed, then hilled the potatoes with abit more of that, plus leaves. The bed will kind of build itself as I keep layering dirt, compost, and then hay. It's the best I can do this season, so I will see what happens.

Next year, hopefully, I will have raised beds where I now have my veggie garden, and I can use some of that for potatoes. But for this year, we will see how this works out.

Thanks again for all the help!

Emmie

An update: I poked around a bit today, and found several potato vines starting to peek through the mulch. I'm so happy they are growing! I'll let you know as I see more, right now I don't seem to need to do anything but watch the little leaves poke through.

Emmie