About 2 months ago I start my Potato Bucket Project. I used six 5-gallon buckets from Lowes and this tutorial.
I followed the directions like a good little gardener but I wasn’t seeing what I was s’pposed to be seein’. Disconcerting to say the least.
Well, I had a bit of a hiccup with the whole potatoes thing. [APPARENTLY] I did not allow the seed potatoes to sufficiently sprout before planting. So, while I’m spending my days carefully watering and being sure the buckets got lots of sun, the potatoes were just…..s l o w l y…..rotting away. I discovered this as dug down through the mulch to figure out why it I hadn’t seen the “promised” sprouts coming through the soil and it had been like 3 weeks. Side note: rotting seed potatoes are nasty. So I had some extra seed potatoes (which I had ordered from Seed Savers Exchange) and went and put them in a brown paper sack and stuck them in the closet for about a week and that seemed to do the trick! I ended up with some real good sprouts and put them in the buckets (slightly shallower than the 4” I did for the first round). So in a week or two I finally saw this:
I piled up some more mulch on top of the plants today. That way the buried parts of the stems form roots and I gets me more po-ta-toes! That’s the whole point, right? I may do the next round of mulch piling using the FREE STRAW I got a couple months ago. Will update later…
I love your post on Potatos! We will have to compare notes on the bucket method! The foliage looks great! Potatos are trial and error! Eventually it all works out!
ReplyDeletethis is cool! the other day i watched at Home with Jamie Oliver potatoes episode(WATCH IT!!!). i had a fingerling potato plant that needed to be put it in soil, so i did it yesterday. it already had 4 baby fingerlings. @ the roots & u could see where the original potato start was. very cool & amazing the whole thing. my 1st time growing potatoes, but im already super excited!
ReplyDeletePS thanks for the comment. Matilija Poppies coming up soon...check back later ;)