Growing Potatoes

Potatoes. Don’t we all love them? I certainly do and all its starchy glory. I like them fried, baked, boiled, mashed, and everything in between. Last year and the year before I had decided I’d attempt to grow potatoes. Going in I thought this was going to be an easy task but it is proving to be quite difficult.

  Potatoes prefer loose dirt with a Ph level of 5.8 to 6.5. You can plant them in the early spring or late summer. I planted them at both times and the ones in the early spring in my garden zone were slightly bigger than the ones in late summer.

  You plant the potatoes stub side upwards and 3 to 5 inches below the surface. Once the leaves appear, cover the plant with dirt, do this a few more times. Try to keep the dirt moist but not too wet.You can start harvesting potatoes after the potato plant starts to flower. I personally have never seen a potato flower before so I might be doing something wrong. Once all the leaves die you have to harvest them or they will rot.

  I chose to not grow potatoes directly in the ground nor did I put them in my garden bed. In the main garden bed, the one that was already built when we first moved here, the dirt is mostly clay and is very stiff. From my little knowledge at the time I figured that the potatoes wouldn’t be able to stretch fully. 

 One day I was scrolling through Pinterest when I came across a pin that had these bags with flaps on the sides. Immediately I went to Amazon to find a similar bag. They were about 1 foot wide and 2 feet tall. I filled them with dirt and planted a few of the potato starters I bought. 

  After the plant had finally died around fall I hopped and skipped with indescribable excitement to welcome my homegrown potatoes to their new world only to pick them out and their sizes to be comparable to a grape. Right after I exclaimed to my family I would arrive with potatoes to fry I took my harvests of five grape-sized potatoes into the house to become a laughingstock!

   I have no plans on using the bags for potatoes again. In the future, I will probably use a wider and deeper gardening bed which will give it more space to spread out and a chance for me to plant more. Or I might created mounds of dirt to plant them if I had more space.

  Do I have plans for them at all? Yes, I do have plans for the bags this year. I have several root vegetable seeds that I want to try including red onions and beets. Hopefully, their harvest won’t be as underwhelming.

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