One of the things that I really wanted to try in our first year of gardening was potatoes. So I placed an order with Diggers Club, and six (long!) weeks later I had:

• 8 x Kipfler seed potatoes
• 8 x King Edward seed potatoes
• 8 x Desiree seed potatoes

Now, on reading the notes that came with the potatoes, I quickly realised that I’ve probably ordered too many. Way too many! Apparently each seed potato will generate 10 new potatoes, making 240 potatoes in total. That’s a lot of potatoes.

No matter, better more than less 🙂

Now all that was needed was somewhere to put the potatoes; cue another garden bed. Luckily I rode past some workmen cutting up an old (and somewhat rotted) paling fence, and they were very happy for me to take away what would otherwise be going to the tip.

One car trip later, I pulled together the following supplies:

• Four pieces of 50×50 treated pine, recycled from under the house and cut into 600mm lengths
• 24 recycled fence palings, roughly 2m in length
• weatherproofed phillips head screws

The result was a large 2m x 2m garden bed, with the ability to add extra planks to raise the height of the sides as the potatoes grow. That should increase the size of the harvest.

Now came the tricky part, preparing and planting the garden bed. Reading up, I obtained a number of different pieces of advice, not all matching up. If in doubt: make it up, and hope for the best.

This is what I decided to do in the end:

• thick layer of newspaper
• layer of straw
• thin layer of soil and compost
• potatoes, at 40cm x 40cm spacings
• mix of soil, compost, straw and cow mature to a depth of 10cm

Now to wait, and hope for the best. I’ll post another photo when the potatoes have sprouted.