…ato Towers in them and all survived Hurricane Irene!” PJ Benoit, customer service, gardens intensively in her small urban yard. She’s been growing potatoes in eight Potato Grow Bags for several years. “I use 100 percent of my own compost and add our organic All-Purpose Fertilizer. I have wonderful results and haven’t had to buy a potato since I began using this system.” The garlic on the left spent the winter in its…
…or the longest storage life, it’s important to let the potatoes mature at 55-60º for a few weeks in a completely dark place. Cull the bruised and damaged tubers for immediate use, then store the rest in a dark, humid place at 40º. Inspect regularly and remove soft and decaying tubers. A few of my favorite sources for organic seed potatoes are Fedco Seeds Moose Tubers, Wood Prairie Farm, and Seeds of Change. For more on growing potatoes, read Ha…
…h of my investment in seed potatoes. The crop also kept my family in potatoes for most of the winter. Every pound of seed potatoes I planted yielded about 12 pounds of harvest. In other words, we dug up nearly four bushels or 200 pounds of spuds from just 18 pounds of “seed”. As these Flowering Potatoes show, the plant is especially beautiful when in bloom. The term “seed potato” is a bit of a misnomer. Although you can grow potatoes from…
our big vegetable garden. But as I age and the number of people at our dinner table shrinks, so has our garden. Growing food in a smaller, more efficient garden is a new priority for us. Last year I grew enough potatoes in a 3′ x 3′ Grow Bed to last our family of three until the new year. I’ve heard good reports about growing potatoes in fabric Potato Bins this summer, too. The bags allowed my condo and apartment-dwelling frien…
wing, it sends its roots down into the soil. The sweet potato tubers form on those roots so there’s no need to hill up the plants. With this in mind, I assembled four Mini-Grow Beds; raised beds that measure 18″ wide x 3 ft. long x 10″ deep. I stacked two of the beds on top of each other so I would have one bed that’s 20″ high and two beds with 10″ high sides. Three plants went into each raised bed. I am curious to see if having extr…
If you had to limit your diet to a single food, potatoes wouldn’t be a bad choice. Baked, boiled, chipped, fried, mashed, roasted or scalloped — the lowly potato can taste completely and deliciously different depending on how it’s prepared. A selection of potoatoes harvested from Potato Grow Bags. Good Varieties for Baking Butte Caribé Carola Elba Red Cloud Rose Gold Swedish Peanut Yukon Gold If you had to limit your diet to a single…
nts been able to put all their energy into making tubers instead of producing new leaves, our yields would surely have been higher. Here are the results: Bed 1: 10″ Grow Bed: 13.4 lbs. Bed 2: 10″ Grow Bed: 12.96 lbs. Bed 3: 20″ Grow Bed: 20.76 lbs. As you can see in the photos, the plants in the 10″ deep beds were crowded and most of the tubers they produced were intertwined and underdeveloped. For that size bed, two plants would have been…
Wow! The largest tuber weighed in at 4 lbs., 7 oz. Do you grow sweet potatoes? Until this year, my answer would have been “no”. As heat-loving plants with a long growing season, they didn’t seem well-suited to my zone 4 garden. This year, we tried growing sweet potatoes in the Potato Grow Bags. The result has been a sweet success. The largest tuber weighed in at 4 lbs., 7 oz. Total harvest from the two Potato Grow Bags was 19…
…the plant’s stem, the more of the stem that’s covered with soil, the more potatoes will form. With the Potato Bag, the whole burying part is super easy. The potatoes get planted near the bottom of the bag in about 4 inches of soil. As the plants grow taller, you cover the stems by adding more soil to the bag. It’s pretty much foolproof. In our test gardens, we have experimented with a number of different fabric pots, and this P…
Curzio Caravati with some of the 300 Potato Grow Bags at the Kenosha Potato Project. As founder and curator of the Kenosha Potato Project Curzio Caravati has grown and catalogued more than 300 varieties of potatoes in his collection. Why? Because he is passionate about preserving the genetic diversity of heirloom potatoes and saving varieties from extinction. “Preserving a storehouse of information helps protect against diseases of the fut…