At the beginning of the growing season, Mr. Bear built us a potato box. We planted eight seed potatoes in the bottom, and continually mounded up the soil around the growing potato plants until they reached the top. Then we waited. The plants never flowered, and I worried that we would have no potatoes, though I've read that sometimes potatoes form without the flowering.
Once the plants died back completely, I stopped watering them and let them dry out. Then it was time to see what was going on down there all this time!
Mr. Bear spread out a tarp and up-ended the box.
We dug around in the soil, looking for our Yukon Golds.
Our initial finds were quite promising.
But as we dug, it became apparent that our dreams of heaping pounds of spuds were to remain unfulfilled.
There weren't many, and most of the potatoes were about the size of pearls. Perhaps we should have waited longer. We'll know better for next year.
Out of our eight seed potatoes, we reaped a modestly-sized bag of baby spuds.
This is our entire harvest.
Not much, but enough for dinner.
Mr. Bear conserved the soil by somehow managing to fold it up in the tarp and dump it back in the box.
I was disappointed by our first try at the "trash can" method, but this is our experimental first year growing food, and we are learning much.
did the potatoes flower? once they flower and the flower buds start to fall off, then the potatoes are grown and ready for diggin' up. :) I learned this the hard way ...
ReplyDeleteThey didn't flower, I kept waiting for them to flower, but the vines died back anyway, and I'd read a few things that said they can produce potatoes without flowering, so flowering isn't necessarily a reliable indicator.
ReplyDeleteIt's been a really weird growing season here, anyway, even Greenbluff has been having tons of problems with their crops.