Sunday, September 19, 2010

Homestead Experiment #7-Potato Update!


Our potato buckets have been looking pretty pitiful, which is actually a good sign. That means it's time to harvest!! Actually our Russet bucket died off about a month ago, but I'd been waiting to blog until the other joined it. I'm not sure as to why it died off so early. We got an 'okay' harvest out of that one. It was better than last year, but nothing to crow about.



As you can see, we got some nice sized new potatoes from 3 or 4 seed potatoes. The kids had fun digging for them, but it was kind of a let down compared to what I was envisioning.

Bite-sized treasure!












Tonight's bucket, on the other hand, really delivered! It was the bucket with the yukon gold seed potatoes and the Russian fingerling organic potatoes that I bought from Fred Meyer's. As you can see, my harvesters were just as enthusiastic, and the harvest was MUCH better!




Yukon golds on the left, Russian fingerlings on the right.

I think it's interesting to note that the fingerlings far surpassed any of our other spuds. Most experts warn against using store bought potaotes because they are treated with retardants to prevent sprouting. When I saw the fingerlings at the store, they were sprouting wildly, so I decided to give them a shot. As we can see, it payed off much better than the expensive seed potatoes from the nursery!

So, in summary, we didn't have a huge windfall of taters, but given our 2 short little buckets, I didn't really expect to. We won't be feasting on them every day, but for what we put into it, we actually got a good return on our investment. An added bonus is that this is a crop we can pretty much grow anywhere like this. Even if we end up stationed somewhere that is lacking a yard for a garden, we can still grow some potatoes as long as we have a deck or porch. Pretty cool, eh?

3 comments:

  1. So COOL! I was telling Don and the girls about this and we are going to try it next spring. I have to look into the Russian fingerlings cause we sure like potatoes around this household :) Back to studying.....

    Heather

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  2. Thank you! I was wondering about using organic potatoes from the veg section. Great to see that you tried it anyway and had such a great turnout.

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  3. Yes, and I've actually decided against buying 'seed' potatoes at all this year since we did so well with the others last year. Instead I doubled the amount of fingerlings (from the organics section at the grocer again), and also have sprouted some russets from the same section. We shall see...:)

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