Potato Companion Planting Plan

We previously completed our Corn Companion Planting Plan, our Tomato Companion Planting Plan, our Broccoli Companion Planting Plan and our Lettuce Companion Planting Plan.  That accounts for 6 of our 7 soil beds.  Now we need to complete our Planting Plan for our potatoes.  As always, we'll reference the Purdue University Agricultural Extension Service's Indiana Vegetable Planting Calendar for determining our dates.  Potatoes are supposed to be planted at 12" intervals.  This is perfect in our SFG layout as it gives us one plant per square.  Since we expect the potatoes to fill out the soil as they grow, we're going to take a different approach to intensive gardening with this soil bed.  The allies for potatoes are beans, cabbage, corn, eggplant and peas.  

We're going to employ a different take on the vertical growth approach with our potatoes.  Since we're already going to be employing "hilling", we're going to take that a step further.  Hilling is when soil keeps being added around the potato plant to bury it deeper.  It forces the plant to grow a long underground stem from which more tubers form.  It's been reported to produce some good yields this way.  Our variety comes with a recommendation to hill 4" upon reaching 8" of exposed plant and to continue to do this until the hill is 12" tall.  Besides the irrigation complexity that such an uneven soil bed can bring, I wondered why not raise the entire bed level?  We'll be pushing the hilling boundary to see how much yield we can squeeze out of our potatoes.  As such, we won't interplant anything with them, but we'll employ a few border herbs for protection.  More on that later.  There really isn't a planting plan other than one seed tuber per square foot and hilling up 24" as they grow.  Using this plan we should get the following yield from our garden:

Our chosen potato variety is a mid season which means 80 days to maturity, row planted at 12" intervals with 1/2 lbs seed tubers, should yield (at 6:1) about 300 lbs / 100' row.  Thus:

1 crops X 1 plants per square ft X 3 lbs/ft X 48 square feet = 144 lbs of potatoes.

Our seed tubers ship late March to early April.  Let's assume we get them in the ground by the end of April, at a 80 DTM, that would put our harvest somewhere around the end of July.  If we were to replant at that point, we could potentially have another harvest by the end of October.  Given that potatoes are considered to be very cold hardy and our October 18th first Fall frost date, it's possible we may be able to double the potato yield by growing that second crop.  Since we can't get seed potatoes in July, we'll need to re-use some of our first crop potatoes for the second crop seeding.

Seeds required for this bed:
Potato - 48 X 1 X 1 X 0.5 lbs = 24 lbs @ 25 lbs/pack = 1 packs X $19.50 = $19.50

Now we need to determine the planting dates for these.  The earliest we can plant our potatoes March 20th however, the planting range stretches to May 10th and we are at the mercy of the seed company because these don't ship till late March.  We'll just have to sow these as soon as we get them.  Unlike our other crops, we'll probably sow this one with the entire bed at once.