A few months ago, I decided to do an experiment and try to grow my own potatoes from some potatoes that had sprouted in my kitchen. I had heard that you could grow potatoes in a bucket, and since I only had a little space on my porch for growing things, I decided to try that out.
I haven’t had much success with gardening in the past, so this was an experiment… Would it work, or would I manage to kill it like I’ve killed so many other things I’ve attempted to grow…
Supposedly, when growing potatoes in a bucket, you let it grow until the plant dies, and then you dump it out and find your bucket filled with potatoes.
So since my potato plants had grown and died, I decided to dump out my buckets of dirt today and unearth my huge amount of potatoes!
So first of all, I have to say that I’m not so good at taking care of plants, and that its very possible that the potato plants died, not because they were ready and at the end of their life cycle, but rather, because I took bad care of them, either too much water, not enough water, surviving a snow… And of course, Anneliese likes to pick the leaves from the plants and ended up killing one of the potato plants entirely.
So, I was assuming that I wouldn’t have too high of a yield.
Here’s how many potatoes I found in the first bucket.
Since those look like decent sized potatoes in that picture, I need to explain how large they are. The biggest potato is about the size of a golf ball. The smallest is smaller than a marble. Teeny tiny potatoes. That’s all that was in the first bucket!
This is what was in the second bucket.
One normal sized potato. The rest teeny tiny little nothings, ranging from marble sized to golf ball sized…
And here is the entire yield.
Oh well. Not so many potatoes. But at least I got something and not nada…
Now that I dug up these potatoes, I just planted a few new plants in their place- a few zucchini plants, and few string bean plants. Soon I’ll plant tomato plants in one of my window boxes. I have purslane and scallions growing in another window box. Zucchini because they grow like crazy, and I learned that the entire plant is edible, so even if I don’t end up getting actual zucchini, I can still eat whatever grows, and green beans because they’re expensive here, and tomatoes because they’re easy to grow.
Wish me luck that I have better success with these new plants than I did with the potatoes!
Have you tried growing potatoes ever? Any idea why my potato plants would have died when the potatoes are still this tiny?
