A friend of mine just sent me a link to this fellow's website wherein he discusses planting potatoes in the fall for spring harvest. We just emptied the last of our potato barrels yesterday and got a pitiful yield of very small tubers, so I wasn't going to try that again, this having been my second year of the potato barrel experiment. We found that the potatoes grew best in the narrow zone between the leaves/sawdust and the earth, and that was really the only place they appeared. These were also late maturing varieties, so go figure. We can't grow our potatoes in the garden because they attract incredible numbers of Colorado potato beetles which then go forth to colonize all my other crops, whereas for some reason in the barrels they don't appear at all. Of course, the potatoes scarcely appear, too.
Anyway, here's the link:
http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/williams48.html
Anyone ever heard of this and/or tried it?
Planting Potatoes in the Fall?
