Out in the Garden

Burried Treasure - Aargh!!!

Digging potatoes for the first time feels like you are uncovering buried treasure, especially for kids. Even more so when you plant "Yukon Gold" potatoes. This is the first year we've planted potatoes and it was very successful. In our garden as a kid, digging potatoes was hard work because they were planted in our hard Kentucky clay soil. I read on some other HomesteadBloggers pages in May about growing potatoes in barrels or in a stack of tires to make harvesting easier. I didn't do either, but I used the spirit of the idea.

I started with only 10 seed potatoes, cut them in half and planted the 20 pieces in a 4 foot by 5 foot section of one of my beds. The compost pile was in that spot the previous year, so the soil was great. As the plants grew, I kept adding good dirt and added a 2nd and 3rd landscape timber layer making the bed even more raised. I had planned to keep getting higher and higher like you would growing them in tires, but I ran out of good soil and muscle. The plants make potato tubers all along what once was the stem of the plant if you keep burying the stem. When it came time to harvest, it was easy to get a shovel in and under the potatoes. A few times we harvested them small to add to a roast or something. When we did this we could just reach our hand down in the dirt and find a potato without disturbing the plant. Good loose soil is key! For the rest of the plants, we waited until the tops died back and the potatoes were pretty good size. Look at the potato in the picture below next to the quarter as reference:

I definitely recommend the barrel or tire method. If any of you have written about this or know someone who has, please let me know and I will link to it. For today's post however, I want you to follow this link to the HomesteadBlogger Lighthouse's post. You really should click on the Lighthouse and read a wonderful story by The Farmer's Wife about my beloved golden potatoes. My original idea for this post was to talk more about what she does, but she did such a fantastic job, you should just go to her blog. It is a real treat. Her writing style is fantastic!