planting potatoes

how do  you plant your potatoes do you make a trench or plant them with a dibber and in your opinion is it better to make a trench or just dib them in the ground

my wife always says its  best to make a trench  so planting in a trench it is so what we do is to open a trench with our ridge attachment on the rotavator then plant the potatoes in the trench with a helping of potato fertilizer then cover  the trench back with the ridge attachment so basically we plant the same as commercial grower then before ridging the potatoes i go through the rows and weed the crop then till the rows with our rotavator to make the soil fine for ridging

having said all that we planted a couple of raised beds with potatoes with a dibber and even planted the pink fire apple the same instead instead of laying them in a trench my wife said they won't grow so will they grow ok or should i have set them on there side ?

For about the last 6 years I've used a bulb planter, that lifts out a plug of soil. I put the potato in the hole and drop the soil from the planter back in the hole I didn't notice any change in yield from previous years when I dug a trench.

I use a trowel and dig a hole about 6-8 inches deep for each potato.

That’s what we do too.

I grow mine in no dig beds now and as others do plant them with a trowel just below the surface. I "earth up" with very cheap compost , grass clippings or a mix of both and get nice really clean potatoes that can be lifted by hand so none get damaged by a misdirected fork The only thing with the grass clippings is that they do seed the bed a little bit but nothing that a few minutes hand weeding does not sort out.