Potato Experiments – Mounding Up
Gatsby Seed Potatoes Organic
Price range: £6.80 through £56.00
Potato Experiments: Mounding up the emerging tubers.
One of the most common questions we get is whether mounding potatoes up really makes a difference. We certainly advise this approach.
By drawing more soil or compost around the stems, you create extra room for potatoes to form underground 🌱 while also helping protect new tubers from sunlight. ☀️
Any potatoes exposed to light can turn green, and green potatoes should not be eaten. A good mound helps keep developing tubers covered, protected, and growing happily underground. 🚜 More stem buried can mean more area for tubers to form, at least in theory.
But there is a catch… it can feel a bit brutal.
As the plants grow, we keep piling soil around them, covering lower leaves and forcing the plant to stretch upwards again. It looks harsh, but potatoes are tougher than they seem. This “tough love” approach encourages the plant to focus its energy below ground where the real treasure is hiding. 🥔
Will it mean bigger harvests? More potatoes? Or no real difference at all? However, we are not actually testing the effectiveness of mounding up this year! We are not testing the opposite approach, ie leaving potatoes completely unmounded. 🥔 (errrrr read that we didn't think of this one!)
Quite simply, we do not have enough planted to risk sacrificing part of the crop for a “no mound” trial this season. 🌱Some experiments have to wait their turn!
But it is firmly on the list for next year. 📋 It will be fascinating to compare heavily mounded plants against potatoes left more naturally to see what difference it really makes to yield, size, and greening. 👀
Growing potatoes is never just one simple trick; it is a giant jigsaw of weather, variety, soil, watering, spacing, feeding, and timing. Our experiments are about testing the little details that gardeners debate every year.
Have you tried heavy mounding before? We would love to hear what worked (or did not work!) in your garden.
Tough Love in the Potato Patch 🥔
Keep mounding up until the soil level is just beneath the level of the bag.
Our potatoes made an appearance about 18 days after we had sown the chitted ones. The non-chitted appeared a few days later than all the other bags. We don't see that it would be a significant difference for this project, as we started late in the season. However if they had been planted at the start of April and others chitted till the start of May, the difference would have been more noticable as the soil would have been cold and damp and so growth would not have been as quick. (This is still just a threory and we would have to start earlier in the year next season!)
All our grow bags were mounded up on 13th June 🥔 and again on 27th June getting the level to near the top of the grow bags.🌱 The same compost was used.
As the plants grow taller, the extra more compost encourages extra underground stem growth and creates more space for potatoes to develop. It may look a little harsh at times — but that is all part of the tough love approach! 🚜
Mounding up is also recommended if you plant directly into the ground - shown in the pictures below.
🌱🥔✨🌱 Thousands of you grow potatoes with us every year, and together we can learn far more than any single grower ever could. Let’s compare notes, share results, and see which potato-growing myths actually stand up to a proper test. 🧪 🥔
📊 A quick note on our experiments… These are small, real-life garden trials, not lab conditions, so of course they have their limitations. Soil, weather, and growing conditions all play a part, but that’s exactly what makes them useful. They reflect what actually happens in a normal garden, not just on paper.
