My favorite crops to grow are potatoes! I love eating potatoes which would be an obvious reason why they are my favorite but they are also really easy to grow and a beautiful plant to have in the garden. This year to give me a little more room in my boxes I decided to get a little creative and figure out a different place to grow them this year. So as you can see below I decided to use plastic party barrels as my make shift potato boxes. I waited till a little after Halloween and picked some up at Walmart on sale for 5$, they seem like a perfect size to grow some potatoes but since this is my first year using them we will see.
This is me planting my potatoes.. Potatoes are a lot different than most plants because you plant them using seed starts. Which you can buy at most nursery's or home depots. A seed start is just a potato that is all wrinkly and for lack of a better word " old looking " which it is, and it has and eye growing out of it. I'm sure everyone has experienced having an old potato in your cupboard that ends up spouting a little something when it was left too long. This is part of that same idea but you can't just plant potatoes from the grocery store because they are usually treated with something to help them not sprout. It's best to buy them from a nursery because they are usually certified disease free and already have a eye spouting out, so they are ready to plant right out of the bag. Now when i'm talking about potatoes I didn't plant big russet potatoes, I planted new potatoes a red a white variety I don't know much about the russet variety and they are so cheap at the grocery store I haven't felt the need to really research too much into that. The new potatoes suit me just fine and they are so delicious fresh out of the ground!
I follow a square foot gardening plan and according to that I can put 4 potatos starts per 1 sq ft. So they are a little tight in my buckets i'll have to see if the get too crowded. Now I did drill holes in my buckets on the bottom to let the water drain. Then put newspaper on the bottom just so they don't clog up with soil and the soil doesn't run right out. I also routed my irragation over to my buckets so I don't have to worry about hand watering them. So back to planting the potatoes. I filled the bottom of the barrel with 6-8 inches of soil placed my seed potatoes in and then covered them up with 3-4 inches of soil.
About a week later my potato plants started to peak up through the soil.
You then want to cover your little plants leaving just a few tips showing with a few inches of more soil.
Another week later my plants sprouted up again, and again you'll want to cover them with a little more soil. You'll want to continue this process until your soil reaches up to 1-2 inches below the edge of you container or bucket in my case. Potatoes are an amazing crop to grow and so rewarding. What is really fun about potatoes are you don't have to pull the whole crop when you want to start harvesting you can just dig and sneak a few potatoes for dinner and then continue to let the plant grow!
ooooh! I am excited about this blog Christina! I am following! Maybe you could do a guest post on my blog sometime soon:)
ReplyDeleteemily
Thank you for doing a blog on potatoes. I always hear how easy it is but I have never tried them. My husband, Jon, says that tires work well for potatoes. Because you can stack the tires for the more layers of dirt. Since he has lots of old motorcycle tires, now we have a use for them. I love your garden. It is so neat and pretty. Since we just moved in to this house we have to break in a new garden. We have a lot of land so we are using the dirt we already have. But we also have the problem of too much heat. The first year for a garden is a lot of work. We are calling this our experimental year. If it works, great, if not, remember for next year.
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