Sunday, September 14, 2008

Potatoes!

I wrote earlier this year about planting potatoes in an old trash can(well-2 if you get picky about it). I knew nothing about doing in except that it could be done. I was told simply to plant them in 12in of soil and keep adding soil as the tops grew. Thats all the instructions i had. Well it can be done! The tops grew great guns and the grasshoppers thought they were delicious all summer. So this weekend we decided to see what was in the cans.

So hubby and the kids started dumping and digging. This is what we found! Not a lot of potatoes and not very many big ones but the kids were thrilled to have grown thier own that it was worth it. We started with 2 cut up store bought potatoes and ended up with this. The biggest ones are about 4 or 5 in long and the littlest ones are about the size of a quarter.

Things to remember next summer: add less soil more often, find a way to deter grasshoppers(or whatever was eating the leaves), wait till maybe October to harvest to get bigger potatoes, consider different variety of potatoes to grow faster(perhaps the reds mom and dad always grew?)

1 comment:

sb said...

I was really excited to see that someone has actually done this! I've been wanting to do it for quite a while but have never gotten around to it. Here in California we can plant potatoes in the fall, so, inspired by your post, I'm finally going to do it.
sb
sblifeinthe831.blogspot.com