locavore | From Dirt to Dinner

Test Potato

Growing potatoes is kind of mysterious, so we grew one test potato on it’s own so that we could pull it part-way through the season and all the kids (and the rest of us!) could see what was going on under there. We planted all the potatoes right around Saint Patrick’s Day, except for the Blues because their seed potatoes didn’t arrive from Seed Savers until later.

Forming New Potatoes

It’s easy to see that the potatoes–and the roots–all form *above* the seed potato that you plant in the ground. You almost have to think about these guys upside down. It’s the soil that you put in on top of them that they care most about, not so much the soil that they are sitting on when they get planted. I was amazed to see how many potatoes were forming on this one plant that hadn’t even been hilled.

Basket of Rattes

Now I am curious to see how many potatoes we will be able to raise in the small spaces we have used. The La Ratte seed potatoes from Full Circle Farm are growing in an old trash basket that might hold five gallons, if we’re lucky. There are four plants in there and they have been hilled nearly to the top.

Big-Bag I think I remember that the potato sacks we used each hold fifteen gallons, and they are nearly full of soil at this point as well. Each sack is planted with four or five potatoes, the same amount we used in the much smaller basket of La Rattes. So maybe we’ll find out the consequences of crowding when we compare the harvests, but it will be hard to interpret, since we used different varieties.

The real test of how many potatoes we can produce in garden this size will be the All Blue’s.

On Blue Hill

When I asked at the nursery the other day what they would recommend we use to supplement our own compost when we hill our 4′ x 8′ potato patch they started doing the math for how many cubic feet we would need and some eyebrows went up. “How many potatoes are you growing?!” was asked more than once.

But that’s OK. It’s only 32 plants. Kids love potatoes, right? And these potatoes will be nearly purple. That’s got some fun appeal, doesn’t it? Not to mention all the antioxidants from the phytochemicals that cause the color in the first place.

I better go find out what you need to do to store potatoes for the winter…

Potato Build-A-Bed

The vertical growing we’re experimenting with in the Dirt to Dinner garden includes lots of different trials. We have a bed of All Blue potatoes that started out in a shallow raised bed in 4″ of soil. We are hammering on new boards and adding more soil until the potatoes are eventually growing through 2′ of soil in a raised bed at least that tall, in hopes of a larger potato harvest.

Bamboo and Bandannas

We have the Three Sisters beds where the corn will grow to support the beans that will climb up the stalks and the squash will, ideally, cover the ground, shade everybody’s roots and help keep the whole thing stable in a headwind. Luckily, the beds are up against the fence.

We are also using several different vertical methods with our tomato crops. The determinate plants, like the Romas and the drying tomatoes, are staked with bamboo poles since they aren’t expected to grow much more than 3′ tall.

And then we have the fancy stuff.

Scared of Heights?

Like the four different varieties of watermelons we are trying to grow on trellising. (Ice Box, Yellow Doll, Tiger Baby and New Orchid) And the cantaloupe and Spaghetti Squash. And the dozen different winter squash from Italy with names none of us can pronounce that we are hoping to train onto netting strung between metal poles.

Some of it sounds crazy, I know. But vertical growing is hard to resist. The kids have 112 square feet in their individual growing boxes. When we add the trellising to the northern sides of the beds, that gives them, more or less, an additional 120 square feet of growing space on the vertical. The peas and the cucumbers will love it, maybe they will take their friends along?

Happy Climbers

If nothing else, the green beans will grow up the nets we have set out for them. They won’t be easier to pick this way, but we chose mostly drying beans to grow in this section so we don’t have to mess with them alot. And I did slip in some Kentucky Wonder on the end. I am hoping they will be worth the extra trouble to harvest.

From Dirt to Dinner

Learning in the Garden

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Test Potatoes Are Up

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