Digging the Potatoes 2009

It is such a long term project, you plant them and then you wait and wait and wait.   At the start you check each day to see if you can see any shoots, and you fill the pot higher as the shoots start to poke through.  Then you wait, flowers come and go and eventually (for our main crop anyway) the foliage starts to die away.     All through July T&J asked if it was time to dig the potatoes but it was not until mid August that we finally did.

These are potatoes grown in pots (we did two in total, a pot for Tom and a pot for Jack).   The real fun is the digging and searching in the soil for the potatoes, like digging for gold, and it is a fantastic afternoon activity for children.

Next year (and I must remind myself of this when the time comes) we will try growing potatoes in old rubble sacks.  The pots we have used for the last two years do the job great but they not only take up a lot of room they taper at the bottom too so a lot of space is taken up with  limited room for actual potatoes growing.  The bag idea then will be in theory all about planting, filling up as they grow, and then leaving.  Bags don’t take up a lot of space.

As soon as we had dug up the potatoes then we refilled one of the pots and planted some "seed" potato with the idea of getting new potatoes for Christmas day.   This is certainly a bit hopeful but not impossible.   Mind you, we have not given it a good start as the soil is the reused soil from the pots (watered with diluted worm wee in an attempt to feed it a bit) and the potatoes are ones we found in the back of the food cupboard sprouting.    But, fingers will be kept crossed during the next months…

2 thoughts on “Digging the Potatoes 2009

  1. Well done!! We had a nice crop too. Kids were really impressed and potatoes were delicious. We’re trying the Christmas potato thing too, but I fear it may be too cold up here already 🙁

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