Potatoes, Planted.

One of the best things about having mild weather combined with long evening light is that I actually can get a thing or two done in the garden, after a long day of work.  Yesterday, I broke out the tiller and turfed up the back garden for the first time.  I think I may need to do it a few more times, before I break up all the mats of Creeping Charlie and can rake them out of there, but it is nice to see black garden dirt instead of a blooming purple haze from corner to corner.  I thought about doing it again today, but decided to give my overworked muscles a break and tackled another couple projects.

In addition to cleaning out the chicken coops and giving all of the girls, young and old, new bedding to fluff around in, I planted my potatoes.  During last weekend's 100 Mile Garage Sale, I found three old, beat-up galvanized garbage cans complete with dinged up lids.  I added them to my previous stash of bins, giving me a glorious total of six potato bins to play with.  After a bit of a bleach rinse to kill off any residual critters, I drilled holes in the bottoms for drainage and added 3 or 4 inches of composted rabbit manure.  Toss in the seed potatoes, add a little more compost on top, and there you have it:  Season 2012 potatoes are in.  I wound up with three bins each of Kennebec and German Butterball, two excellent varieties that are delicious and good keepers.

As the potato plants grow, all I will need to do is add more layers of compost or rotten straw and the plant will continue to grow up to the top.  All along the plant, under that lovely layer of growing material, it will shoot out little roots that will eventually fatten into potatoes.  I've used this method in the past, and it is really effective.  One year, I planted one, just one teeny seed potato, and I got 67 potatoes from it.

 Sixty. Seven. 

Seriously.

 I also find that I hardly ever have issues with Colorado Potato beetles.  I'm not sure if it is growing them "up", off the ground, or growing them in containers that confuses them, but at most I have found one bug and squashed it flat promptly.  It is a vastly different story than when I have grown my potatoes in ground, and wound up spending days on end hunting and destroying those striped pests.  Bleah.

Pest issues aside, I find that since my garden space is very limited, I am best served by growing my potatoes in containers.  With these bins, my plan is to haul them down into the root cellar (which has yet to be remodeled) and store them with the lids on, for winter goodness.