Potato Harvest

Not really having much experience with potato growing, we've been pretty much winging it this year. I planted two large containers with five starter potatoes each back in (I think) April. I followed the advice of many, many people and slowly added dirt to the containers a few inches at a time as the potato plants grew.

We decided to "harvest" one container to check the progress of the potatoes. There wasn't an overwhelmingly huge amount of potatoes, but we did get more than a few meals worth out of that container. Again, not having much experience, I don't know if this is an expected amount, or if we would have had more if we'd waited longer. The plants were pretty much dried out and no longer green on top, I think I'd heard that when a potato plant starts to flower that it is done setting potatoes and when it dries out then those potatoes are done growing. This may or may not be true, I haven't done my homework yet.

We still have the other container to harvest, probably sometime in the next month or so. Maybe this will give me a better idea of what to do next year. By the way, the pile of rocks in the picture above has nothing to do with potatoes...but it is a project that I'll have to get to when the weather cools off. We collected those rocks from the area on our property where the husband had dug ditches for the utility lines to be worked on and connected for the building project he just finished. The rocks are disaster if run over by our riding lawn mower, so because we had to go through and pick them up, we collected them in the bucket of his tractor and he dumped them into my garden. It looks messy now, but they'll look great added onto the rock border that I started in my garden earlier this year. I like free resources, all these rocks have required is a bit of sweat. I've heard before that Irish soil is pretty rocky, and since this post is about potatoes, maybe the rock tangent isn't so off after all!

See you soon!