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Rumor has it that if you bury the potato plants deep, they will produce potatoes all the way up the buried part of the stem. I have never found that to happen, and Ellendra says that no, it does not happen.

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4048051/posts?page=119#119

Later the potatoes have soil ridged over the rows ("hilled") to prevent greening and control weeds in the row.

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The plastic mulch also prevents weeds and eliminates the need to hill and cultivate.

https://extension.psu.edu/potato-production

So it's mostly about covering any tubers that may end up sticking out of the soil to prevent greening and also helps with weeds. Using plastic mulch does the same as hilling. I'm thinking I need some plastic mulch because I decided to feed hay to the goats down in my bigger garden area where I grow potatoes. I did it for two reasons.

1) my little bitty tractor can't lift a round bale of hay but can pull a pallet with a round bale on it, barely. That area was easy to get to.
2) Last place I fed hay, when I forked the hay off, it was a good mixture of manure/pee/hay for composting and the soil underneath was black, moist and fluffy and had the biggest worms I've seen here.

I'm sure it also dumps a bunch of grass seed as well though so weeding will be nearly impossible to keep up with this year. There's a property down the road that had a bunch of blue barrels get strewn around during a storm 4-5 years ago and they've left them just sitting in the woods since. Gonna stop by and ask if I can have them. Maybe I'll just do container taters this year. 10-15 open bottomed half sections ought to grow quite a bit.

I lay the potatoes directly on the ground inside the bucket, add some bone meal, and then cover the seed potatoes with wood chips. As the plants grow, I add more wood chips.

Don't know any place to get wood chips. I've heard of people using straw though and I can get that but have to travel quite a ways.

I think Ellendra has mentioned that at times she's grown potatoes in nothing BUT a pile of straw. Put them on the soil, covered spuds with straw, stood back. Later harvested nice taters.

We found a bunch of wood chips on our property from the previous owner, and our tractor has a chipper attachment so we spent some time last summer chipping up a bunch of branches we found strewn around the property, plus some from trees we thinned out.

Pine and cedar are a pain to chip. They do chip easily enough as the wood is soft, but they tend to gum up the chipper.