About Those $100 Potatoes

VPH has decided that the month-long buying, thinking, and preparing for growing potatoes has taken $100 (very little actual money, but more importantly his time), so he's said that our potatoes had better taste like $100 potatoes.  Remember the red seed potatoes that I bought way back on March 24th:

 

I picked up some Yukon Gold seed potatoes about 2 weeks later and then didn't do much of anything about them for a while.  This is the method we've chosen to use specifically because we have 2 large black trash containers with broken bottoms and this year is all about saving money.  On April 23rd I finally started this project.  My tools for cutting the bottoms off the broken trash cans included heavy-duty gloves, my trusty Felco pruners, and a hacksaw:

 

I decided they'd sit at the end of the vegetable garden where they'd get at least 4 hours of sun per day.  Ideally it would be more, but this was the most logical spot available:

  

And there they sat until Saturday when VPH was finally healthy enough to dig them in:

Once he got the first container in (about a shovel depth, maybe a little more), he used the compost sieve to put the soil he removed digging the hole back in:

 

Part of the reason we're growing potatoes in containers...like most of Connecticut our main crop is rocks:

 

It's tough to see here, but the soil is rather clay-like.  Not terribly so, but between that and the rocks...well yet another reason that we're using containers and a raised bed for our vegetable garden.  So in went 6 Yukon Gold seed potatoes:

 

And VPH sifted the rest of the soil on top of them.  Then he got the other container in, I placed the other half of the Yukon Gold seed potatoes, he covered them, and now we wait for them to grow.  As they do I'll add nice fluffy soil to the trash cans.  I planted a dahlia tuber in between the cans...it will be interesting to see if it grows:

 

Don't they look great down at the end of the veggie garden (just ignore the chaos of the yet to be planted veggie garden):

 

While VPH did the heavy work down there, I worked in the driveway on planting the first bag of red seed potatoes.  I decided that the funky wood box that had an herb and pepper garden last year would be perfect for growing potatoes.  First I dug out the 3 surviving perennial herbs--golden sage, purple sage, and silver thyme--and put them each in a small container.  Then I removed all the soil and the plastic garbage bag (I think the container is perfectly safe) and styrofoam beneath it:

Then a few inches of soil back in, five red seed potatoes planted, and after I took this photo, covered up:

 

I also planted four more red seed potatoes in a big black plastic container I had on hand from a live Christmas tree we bought a few years ago and it will sit in the driveway too.  This is a terrible photo of it, but I wanted to show you (and note for myself) that I filled this container to the top with soil in contrast to the other method we'll be using of "hilling" the potatoes by adding soil to the container as they grow:

 

The other 10 red seed potatoes will go into the two large gray containers below on Sunday, but it was just too hot to be shoveling soil from container to container in the sun and then the mosquitoes came out when the sun went down, so I'm going to get VPH to do it early in the morning:

 

I really am quite excited to harvest and eat my very own potatoes, be they $100 ones or not!  I did a lot more today, but that's a subject for tomorrow's post.

Comments

[mummer]

Will your potatoes be ready to harvest at Thanksgiving? They would make a great addition to our holiday feast.
Meanwhile, how do you keep the raccoons from harvesting too?