The Potato Experiment: Part 1

This year we decided to experiment with growing potatoes. It was a scheme of mine to see if I could get Bryan more involved in the garden this year. When I was pouring over my seed catalog early in the year I asked him what was something he wanted me to grow. He said potatoes. The man could live on potatoes alone. I swear he's Irish and not German.

I purchased two varieties of seed potatoes, Desiree and Yellow Fin. In early April they arrived and I planted the varities in two rows in a garden bed and also a few in buckets of various sizes.

Sometime in July the garden bed started looking a little sad. I was convinced that the buckets would be the winner in this experiment.

Well, this past weekend we decided that it was time to harvest some of the potatoes.



The Yellow Fin potatoes (in the silver buckets) were starting to look ready. I read up that you can tell they are ready when the leaves start turning yellow.



We spread out a tarp and dumped out the first bucket.



We had an excellent crop of big fat worms.



From the three 5 gallon buckets we got only these teeny tiny potatoes. About the size of a finger nail - and not even a thumb finger nail, maybe a ring finger sized finger nail.

We were seriously disappointed, but decided to move on to the garden bed. Last week I pulled up a few dead vines.



Here's what we were left with. That's three remaining vines.

After the disappointing bucket results I had zero faith in this garden bed.



Bryan got in there and started digging.



It wasn't long before we spotted this beautiful sight. Potatoes!



We ended up harvesting this. A platter full of Desiree potatoes. It's not earth shattering or enough to put away in the basement (my original hope), but it was pretty exciting for us.

We still have three buckets and one large trash can of Desiree potatoes growing that we're leaving be for a few more weeks. So I'll check back in later with Part 2 of our potato saga.