In this year's garden, I decided to try to grow my own potatoes! I bought a "potato pot" and seed potatoes at Gerten's garden center, picked up an empty "pickle bucket" at Firehouse Subs, and began my trial program. More about the initial planting is in this post.
I drilled holes in the pickle bucket and cleaned it (and left it out in the garage for weeks to air out the vinegar smell). In mid-April, I planted 3 seed potatoes in the potato pot (which has an inner section you lift out to harvest the potatoes) and 4 in the bucket. Here are the early sprouts to the potato put (the second photo is from April 29th):
When the weather warmed up (late May), I moved the buckets out to the back porch, and they seemed to be growing strongly, with vines all over the place. But the deadly combo of not enough sun (once the trees filled in) and my forgetting to water them, didn't bode well.
The vines all died away, without flowering, and I assumed that we wouldn't have a harvest. So I left them along until mid-September. As I was cleaning up the pots on the back porch as part of preparing for fall and winter, I decided to dump the pots. Now, the pickle bucket had picked up a few new vines, but they never got big or flowered (what I'd read were to key signs it's time to harvest).
As I dumped the potato pot, I was surprised to find a harvest of new potatoes!
And when I dumped out the bucket, I found even more (and bigger) potatoes! Here is the final harvest for 2022:
Now to decided what to make with this slight pile of potatoes... they won't store long, they are very thin skinned. I have a pile of carrots (and celery) from the garden, perhaps I'll try a beef stew!
My final haul is 2 lbs and 1.5 oz of potatoes!
Thanks for stopping by!
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