To each his/her own, but beware of false logic..... Small potatoes are not necessarily "more likely produced by weaker, less fit plants more likely to have been infected with viruses and other potato diseases," as proposed by mike_marietta above. Small potatoes are the ones formed last and have not had time to grow large by the time the potatoes are dug and harvested. It's just like with so many other vegetables/fruits; the ones formed close to harvest, won't be as large/ripe/mature as the ones formed earlier. The old timers I grew up around knew their potatoes and how to grow them. They had grown potatoes for generations. They chose the smaller (1 to 1.5-inch dia) potatoes for seed, and I guess the reason was that the smaller ones have more eyes and, therefore, produced higher yields. And perhaps they believed that the small potatoes were less likely to be diseased due to their young age. Sometimes with store/market-bought potatoes, the largest potatoes have diseased parts, whereas the smaller potatoes from the same harvest/bin don't have diseased parts. On the issue of storing potatoes in the ground, I'd be concerned about mice and other vermin eating and fouling the potatoes with excrement. On the issue of wrapping seed potatoes, it sounds like a very good idea.

The first year of new lasagna beds worked great for me. The previous year I had built the beds with layers of grass clippings, old leaves, etc. In the spring I topped it off with some well composted horse manure. The horse owner had added bedding, kitchen scraps and wood ashes during the winter and turned it. Nice black stuff and hardly any weeds that first year. Year 3 began with weeds I hadn't removed at the end of my second gardening year. We have some nasty witch grass and another creeping weed that was taking over the edges of the bed. My beds are raised in mounds but don't have wood sides. In early spring I put down black plastic to warm the soil. After a month, the weeds had been killed and were easy to remove. That bed is not densely planted with tomatoes. I keep meaning to put a border of wet newspapers covered with grass clippings but haven't done it yet. I have in other places. Last weekend I tore out the spent sugar snap pea plants and discovered a lot of weeds had gotten in and around the plants but because the base was rotted newspaper and leaves and never walked on, it was pretty easy to pull all the weeds out. Right now the parsnip bed is edged with newspaper/grass clippings and looks completely weed free. It really helps to have a good hand weeder. I have an L-shaped weeder similar to a cape cod weeder. Loosen the soil and then you can pull the weed. If it has a trailing root, the weeder can help scoop it out. I also find that wear garden gloves with a rubber coating (bought at the farm store) make pulled weeds easier. I drag the weeder thru the soil to uproot tiny weeds between rows. I think the best advantage of a raised bed is that the soil stays nice and loose making weeding easier. I think weeds are a fact of life but a variety of methods keep them at a minimu.

I think the effect remains to be seen depending on how stressed individual trees were. There is a wide variability in our yard with some trees losing entire limbs (I watered all my fruiting trees/bushes). This was from a UC Davis site: "Drought irrigation strategies must be judged not only on how production is affected in the drought year, but also on how production is affected in the following seasons. In fact, the risk of catastrophic yield reductions in nut crops is low in a given drought year, but substantial the following season unless effective drought strategies are used. This is true even if the drought lasts only one year. This principle was illustrated in a recent test in almonds using several irrigation regimes in a simulated drought year. In each regime, a total of 16 acre-inches/acre of water was applied over a season, but with different timings. The results, where most of the water was applied early in the season, marketable yield was relatively unaffected by the drought, but production the following season was reduced by about 75 percent even though the trees were returned to full irrigation the following year. On the other hand, where some water was applied just after the harvest, the following season's yield suffered only about a 30 percent reduction."

What I ended up doing was raking the leaves into the area. Giving the area a good thick covering of leaves and then fired up the mulching mower without the bagger set as high as it would go and slowly mowed over area since it's slightly narrower than the deck of my mower it worked perfectly. The first time I found that it kicked a lot of the ground leaves out the side and into the yard. After that made my layer of leaves extend wider than my mower so the chopped up leaves whouldn't shoot out so far. I repeated that till all the leaves were gone and I had a nice layer of finely ground leaves. The ground can't be tilled as it's too close to a tree and so there are areas where there are roots. I'm planning on raising the bed and adding some good soil to give the plants more room and to add more good soil to the area. The ground when I first tore the sod out was very sandy. The plants did ok, but, I plan on improving the soil to make it better for them. I'm still wondering though if the setup I'm thinking of in the previous post will work. I'm hesitant to have the edge of my flats 3 inches outside the the direct light. And whether or not using some kind of blind or foil wraped deflectors will work. It would be the difference between sitting 4 flats on a shelf as opposed to just 2.