Okay, so I had a pile of potatoes on my shelf in the living room, as one does, and got super lazy about them so they stayed there all winter and sprouted. Instead of just hucking them in the compost, I decided to plant them.

May 11, 2024

Here are the potatoes I gathered from the shelf:

And here they are that same day, planted. I did not plant all of the potatoes that were in the bowl.

It looks like maybe three purple and nine yellow?

Here they are all ready for a nice nap:

Over time I hilled the plants with straw.

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August 24, 2024

This is the bed as of yesterday:

I started by moving the straw gently, and feeling around for potato plant stalks, like this one:

As I dug deeper, I found groups of them:

You can see how thick the straw layer was in the photo above. When I planted them, I did not place them very deep into the ground. I like to harvest potatoes with my hands and not tools, to minimize the harm I might do to insects.

This photo shows the hay all cleared away from these plants. You start to see the potatoes creeping out of the soil. Potatoes grow upwards along the stalk as the stalk growns. That’s why they are hilled with either dirt or straw.

This photo shows it a bit better, you can see the potatoes growing in both the soil and the straw layers.

The yellow potatoes grew bigger than the purple ones, and I got a pretty big yellow one:

I threw them in a bowl and sprayed them directly with the hose. I probably shouldn’t have done that because I damaged the skin of a few of them, meaning they may not cure very well. The soil is so sticky, and I got lazy.

Here is my harvest:

I ended up with more than I planted for sure, and maybe more than I started with. I think I can say I at least renewed the potatoes, lol.

A few of them have insect damage.

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As you can see, my soil is awful. It’s really heavy clay and lacks organics. This is one reason for all the wood chips. I decided to plant the potatoes in the ground to help break up the soil a bit (someone told me they do that?) and also because I had nothing to lose.

I did observe evidence of a mycorrhizal network in parts of the soil, which is lovely and showing me that there is hope.

I ended up burying the straw in the bed, covering it with soil, and covering the soil with a plastic tarp I had. Mmmmm, microplastics! I hope to keep the soil free of weeds so it’s easier to deal with in the spring or later in the fall. I’m not sure if I will grow potatoes in here again (in the spring) or I’ll try garlic in this bed (in October).