When mice change the way you grow potatoes

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For years I’ve been an advocate of planting potatoes in a shallow trench and covering them with straw instead of hilling them with soil. But after this year, I am rethinking my strategy. I had some of the nicest plants ever. But, I lost close to one-quarter of the harvest because mice chewed on the potatoes. I don’t want to lose this many again, so next year I’m probably going to hill.

Potatoes are typically one of the easiest crops to grow. Even though they are relatively inexpensive in the grocery store, the flavor of a homegrown potato is well worth the effort.

Ways to plant them

The traditional hill method is how potatoes have been grown for centuries. Dig a-4-6 inch deep trench and plant your seed potatoes about a foot apart. As they grow, pile the soil halfway up the plants. Keep doing this until the hill is up to a foot high, which is a considerable amount of soil. The difficulty in this method is gathering enough soil to protect them, as well as harvesting them. You have to dig a lot and it can be heavy work. But there’s no question the potatoes grow well.

Piling straw on top of the plants reduces the back work during harvesting, but obviously the mice can be an issue. Plant them 4-inches deep, but just use straw to prevent them from being scalded by the sun. They’re easy to dig in the fall simply by pulling back the straw and using a trowel to uncover the potatoes.

Another option is to plant them in a container, particularly if you have space issues. Using a pot (with drainage holes in the bottom, of course) that is at least as big as a 5 gallon bucket, place a couple of inches of soil in the bottom. Place your seed potatoes on top of the soil, then cover with a few more inches. As the potatoes grow, continue to cover them with soil. To harvest, all you have to do it dump the bucket. It’s super easy and, thankfully, it is protected from mice.

Storing potatoes

As you might imagine, if the mice were eating the potatoes in the garden, they headed inside the house when the weather started to turn cold. It just must be a bumper crop of rodents this year despite the excessive heat and drought conditions. I had my first small harvest of potatoes in the pantry closet on the bottom shelf, but had to toss them because a mouse found its way to them. Yes, the potatoes were probably okay if they were cooked, but mice gross me out. I couldn’t eat them.

So when I pulled up the rest of them, I put them in a taller plastic container, set them up off of the ground, and covered them with a heavy towel in the garage. So far there haven’t been any mouse problems. They’ll be okay in the garage until we start experiencing temperatures in the teens. As long as it’s 20 degrees F, or above, it shouldn’t freeze in there. Once we dip into that arena, I’ll bring them back inside, or haul them in the crawlspace (even though with the black widows down there, it’s my last choice anymore).

Lessons learned

I guess the biggest takeaway from this experience is to never assume you’re going to do things one way just because that’s how you’ve done them for years. Next season we’re going back to the old school potato planting to hopefully bring in a greater yield and not have to deal with mouse-eaten spuds.

Meet Amy Grisak

Amy is a freelance author and photographer in Great Falls, MT who specializes in gardening, foods, and sustainable agriculture. She provides information on every kind…

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