We Grew Potatoes 8 Different Ways, Here's What Happened 🥔

Thanks for having me out Kevin! See you next potato planting season 🫡

I was excited about Ruth Stout method, but it appears the same thing that made it very convenient for me to harvest, also made it really easy for RATS to access... So, I'm back to containers for potatoes.

Our greenhouse has gravel for the floor, I battle clover weeds in it. I noticed a week ago a knee high plant growing in the middle of the greenhouse floor, it's a potato plant. It's growing out from under an upside down nursery pot. I lifted the pot and I could literally see a potato plant growing out of a seed potato that just happened to fall on the gravel and root into the gravel. It's insane. Growing potatoes are so fun. Thanks for these videos.

A lot of these methods are clearly made for indeterminate potatoes. Hilling or adding soil to a bucket shouldn't improve the yield of determinate potatoes, so you can't really say anything about those methods from this test (other than that they don't, as expected, work for determinates). You should test with indeterminates instead (and avoid introducing variables like cut vs not cut). Yes, I'm just fishing for another potato video 😄 Random side note. I just had to pull up a potato that had come up right next to a pepper plant. It had grown from a thin piece of potato peel that hadn't broken down properly in the compost. Had it been better placed I would have let it go to see how much potatoes you can get from just a peel!

21:29 you don't NEED straw. You can watch Ruth right here on YouTube say in her own words, "dry mulch" is all you need. I live among many large trees and I use leaves that I let dry. Works great.

I literally dropped a potato on our sand hill and covered it.. its actually growing. Those suckers grow anywhere

Potato Ty's method had a higher yields per potato if you divided by 3. Since you noted that one plant died.

Red Norland potatoes are determinate potatoes. That is, they grow their potatoes on the level that they were planted unlike indeterminate potatoes that grow best with hilling as the potatoes are produced on different levels.

This is by far my favorite type of video. The ability for you to fully encapsulate long-term experiments in a very digestible, informative, and thorough way is why this will always be the #1 gardening channel for learning cold hard facts about the best growing methods. Your ability to showcase scientific, unbiased experiments that take months to draw conclusions from will contribute to the acceleration of farming knowledge development and the growth of the interest from youth. Please never stop experimenting and finding the best growing methods. I Encourage you to begin even more experiments, with just as thorough as a test and analysis process and explanation. Critique: A lot of these methods seem to be for indeterminate potatoes, as you eluded to when saying yellow potatoes would've done better in the deeper holes. It would be a great idea for next year to redo these methods, but use indeterminate potatoes for all of the same methods, and see if that shifts the rankings. Moreover, in one of your past videos, you talked about different potato-growing methods, and mentioned planting determinate potatoes in varying depths and orientations in order to grow several intertwined layers of potatoes in the same bucket \ plot of land. You could test determinate potatoes separately as well -- maybe in an additional plot -- to see if this method and others specific to determinate potatoes would outperform even indeterminate ones planted in the methods best suited to indeterminates. You could then compile growth data for each variety to its best respective growing methods, and see if say, indeterminate potatoes planted 12 feet deep would outperform -- in a [pound of seed] to [pound to harvest] to [square of land] ratio -- determinate ones planted at different depth layers. If so, you may find the best potato varieties someone would want to buy for their space and desire, which you can then sell with your seed business 🙏 You can advertise them and I promise you people (me at least) would buy seeds. If you become a beacon of the best plant growing knowledge, you will be a beacon that new hobbyist gardeners flock too in droves.

I really appreciate your experiments. As a science teacher, I started using your plant experiments to help students practice identifying parts of the scientific method as they prepare for the annual science fair. I am a garden nerd so I was so excited to find your experiments. Keep it up!