Yukon Gold potatoes, Susanna Moodie style

The land around our house is gravel mixed with clay and rocks, so to garden I have had to build upwards because digging down is not only torture, but fruitless (literally). My planting soil, starting with raised beds, is a mix of forest debris, household compost, garden waste, eel grass, seaweed, various scrounged manures and some soil dug from slightly more fertile areas and wheel-barrowed to my garden patches. That means I'm always looking for new ways to easily plant vegetables with less work and time spent on making a new bed. Last year we had spruce trees harvested from our land, most of them from a re-planted plantation that was overgrown and beginning to die (my glorious fairy forest). We also had several dying mature spruce removed from behind out house. The branches and needles lay on the ground through winter and this spring Andy burned various piles, and what he couldn't burn before spring burning season was over, he cleaned up into lovely piles. This May, when making a new potato bed -- I dug this one on a slope in the cut area behind the house -- I realized that there were nicely composting piles of small branches and spruce needles and I decided to experiment with a potato bed I call my "Susanna Moodie bed", for her book, Roughing It In the Bush.

I scraped the needles away from the earth and roughed it up a bit before laying Yukon Gold seed potato along the drill. I pulled a good layer of composting needles and woody branches over the potatoes and waited. Sprouts eventually came through the mulch and I treated the beds as I would a regular potato drill and hoed needle and wood mulch up around the plants. Yesterday we had friends in to supper and I pulled my first carrots, made a salad from our lettuce, tender kale, baby zucchini and onions, basil and dill and I dug some potatoes from my regular bed, lovely clean good-sized red potatoes. I decided to see if anything was growing in the spruce needle mulch and yes, dear reader, there were a plethora of wee yellow potatoes that, once cooked, were delicious!

Experiment successful, and I will plant potatoes in spruce needle mulch again next year. I do wonder though if the success was partly due to the amount of cool, damp weather we've had this summer, perhaps the only good thing to come of it because we North Shorers are pretty tired of the bad weather. A hot dry summer might not have been so kind to potatoes. But I'll let you know next year when I do hope we have a wonderful summer, warm and sunny beach and growing days with the exact right amount of rain falling only only after midnight and ending at 5 AM. Now is that unreasonable expect?

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