Potatoes before hilling

Shovel attachment for Wheel Hoe

So, potatoes are really easy to get into the ground, but what about ways to get them to produce more potatoes per plant? A good and simple answer to this is to do what is called Hilling to your potatoes.

You start with your lovely potato plants, after they’ve grown to be at least a foot above the ground as shown in the before picture.

You take a wheel hoe, a handy dandy invention that’s been around a long time that Sarah recommends as one of the two most important tools for a small farm, and you attach a shovel-looking attachment.

You then run your wheel hoe with the shovel attachment alongside your potato rows, pushing the dirt up onto the potato plants. Your potatoes will then look something like ours do in the during picture.

Potatoes during hilling

Potatoes after hilling

The dirt should have been driven up around some of the bottom leaves of the potato plant. This won’t hurt the plant as long as it’s not completely buried. It will trick the plant into thinking that it must grow taller to get the same amount of sun, instead of growing wider as it does normally. Growing taller makes the plants store more starch in their roots, i.e., grow more and bigger potatoes.

To finish the process, you’ll want to take a regular old hoe and pull the dirt that was pushed up by your wheel hoe and bring it in closer to the plant, covering the first few layers of leaves. It’s safe to cover up until almost the very top, as long as at least the highest layer of leaves is revealed, but we just covered up the bottoms. You can see our finished product in our after picture.

-Joe Ingrao, Excel Scholar Summer 2014