Establishing Growing Spaces with Potatoes and the Ruth Stout Method

Can the Ruth Stout Method Tame Even the Toughest Ground? 

It's April 2020 and we are deep into a community lock-down. The food supply chain is broken, and people are out of work.

Attention has turned to local food security and we decided to bring extra growing capacity into production.

We were already committed to establishing a large growing area on the other side of town, and so there just wasn't the labor available to establish and attend this new space. To complicate matters, this new space was old pasture located at the back of a property, and we had no fencing, no irrigation, and a lot of hungry critters welcoming our planting efforts.

In short, this location was far from ideal. We had to think outside the box...

The year before we ran broilers through this space in a chicken tractor, and as you can see in this photo, the grass and weeds were between 4ft and 5ft tall. When I say this area has heavy weed pressure I really mean it!

We started with the next door neighbor popping over with their tractor to plow up the area in the early spring. Once they were done, it looked like a bombed out war zone. We did our best to remove the rocks and large slabs of sod, but as the clay soil died it set like concrete and became impossible to work by hand. To make matters worse, this ground disturbance triggered the explosion of thistles as their seeds were exposed and germinated.

The next step was to rototill the area in order to break up the large chunks of clay, sod, and remove more rocks.

Once we did this, we were able to form beds using shovels and a final pass over the top of them with the rototiller. As an experiment, we made 2 4ft wide beds without the rototiller and just threw down heavy hay mulch.

Finally it was time to plant the seed potatoes!

Some we planted into the soil as usual, and some we just placed on top of the soil and covered them with a foot of hay to see if they performed any differently.

You can watch this video to see how things progressed through the season: