Ruth Stout Potato Trial - Fall Prep for 2019

After viewing and commenting on Back to Reality's Ruth Stout Potato Garden video, I realized that I was actually not speaking from direct experience. I have grown potatoes for years, and my typical growing method involves heavy mulching. I tend to have vole damage on my potatoes, and I felt sure that the Ruth Stout system would expose most of the potatoes to being attacked by voles.

On further reflection, I felt that there might be some aspects to my current method that result in higher amounts of vole damage than might be the case with the Ruth Stout system. In my system, I only mulch after I have hilled the potato rows twice. This typically happens when the plants are already fairly large and have big top growth. Usually the mulch is over the soil between the rows, right up under the plants. Typically there is a strip of open soil right along the top of the row, where the plants have grown together. It has occurred to me that this un-mulched strip may actually encourage voles to travel up and down the row, directly on top of the potato row. So I might actually be creating an environment very favorable for vole damage on my potatoes.

It is possible that the Ruth Stout system, with its continuous mulch cover, would not produce the same sort of vole travel pattern, and might result in less vole damage over all, even though the potatoes are generally found right at the soil surface under the mulch, which is the area where voles prefer to be as well.

The only way to know for sure is to test both systems side-by-side, and compare the yield and the amount of damage. So that is the plan for 2019.

In this video the plot is shown being prepared this fall, to be ready for planting next spring. Approximately 650 square feet in a 13 foot by 50 foot plot is mulched with greenchop. The greenchop was mown from an area of the pasture that we didn't use this season, and it took approximately 9000-10000 square feet of pasture to provide the mulch. Half of the plot was also mulched with leaves prior to adding the grass mulch.

I'm very curious about how this system of no-till biomass mulching will work compared to my normal potato growing method. My intention is to plant duplicate rows of the same varieties in both plots to attempt to get a comparison of the systems.

Trollforge did a similar comparison trial of potato growing between Ruth Stout's system, and the Back to Eden Gardening system.
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Here's the Ruth Stout video from Back to Reality.
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