I have a little plot at the community garden near where I work. I go there to tend to it on my lunch break so the trick is to get as much done in the limited time I have. I must say it’s a practice in efficiency and I’ve learned a few things while doing it. One of my successes this year was my potato harvest!
Harvesting these potatoes took me no more than five minutes!
Even though buying them in the store is pretty cheap growing them yourself is fun! It’s the discovery of seeing what is under the soil and wondering how many you’ll find! In addition I swear they are so much more creamier when you grow them yourself and of course you know just exactly what chemicals you did or didn’t put in the soil or on the potato itself.
For these seed potatoes I bought at the local Home Depot I used a couple of old bee boxes we had. Any box will do – these just happened to be around and on the bottom I put a wire mesh with widow screen so that no critters would come up from underneath and to keep the soil from mostly falling through when harvesting later.
Then I filled it with potting soil and then placed 4 seed potatoes in the box a couple of inches down. As the potatoes started to grow they say you are supposed to mount the soil up around the plant. To make that process easier I just put another bee box on top and filled the dirt in around it.
Here is a picture of the plant not quite ready to harvest.
Once it becomes more wilted looking I pulled the plants out and flipped over the box and picked up the potatoes in less than five minutes!
I did 4 bins this way of different varieties and each was a success 🙂
You are a smart cookie, Eloine! Way to go! Good looking crop.