My first harvest

I dug up three of my potato plants tonight, the ones that came from store bought potatoes. They were flopped over and drying up, and they pulled right out of the ground when I tugged at them a bit. I started at dusk as soon as I got home and when I was through I was working by braille.

Here's my harvest.

Yes, I found the peanut in the ground with the potatoes. Gee, I wonder how that got there. I include it for size. Besides, I may not have "planted" it, but I did harvest it. Fair is fair. The critters have harvested enough of my stuff this year.

Several more plants, and I could have the makings of lunch. Whaddya think? Roasted? With some cheese and broccoli sauce? And maybe a glass of beer in an acorn cap?

Sigh. Okay, *why* are they so tiny? The plants were dead. Leaving the potatoes in the ground longer wouldn't have helped. Is it because it was store bought potatoes I planted? Did I not fertilize enough? Is it because I've such poor soil? Is it just a bad year for potatoes?

These will keep for a few days, right? Saturday I'll go out there and see if I can find any more produce (although "produce" is maybe not the right word in this case. LOL!). I think these will taste good just plain boiled.

Oh, btw, that's not a dinner plate. That's a small pie plate.

White Hydranga, it is because you used grocery store potatos. In order to have a large harvest of potatos, you have to plant "seed" potatos. But hey, for what you planted, it looks like a good harvest.

The All Blue that I planted came from proper seed potatoes. Once the plants die off and I harvest those potatoes, I'll compare them to these.

They do look like healthy, yummy tubers, but am I growing potatoes for leprechauns or what?

Did you dig through the soil with a fork or just pull the plant? There may be some more tubers in there. I'll be digging ours out this weekend. Hopefully I have some potatoes to harvest this year since they were in the garden bed in the sun. We planted them late, so I'm not expecting a bumper crop. I tried a potato barrel on our deck last year. I planted seed potatoes about the size of the largest one in your photo, and harvested new potatoes the size of the smallest one in our photo! Our deck doesn't get enough sun, so it was "honey, I shrank the potatoes!". LOL! Keep you fingers crossed that this weekend yields a better harvest than last years barrel.

When did you plant out your pototoes, ie, how long were they in the ground?

This message was edited Sep 14, 2006 9:27 PM

By the end, it was so dark I was just sifting through the dirt with my fingers. There might well be more there. They're so small, I could easily have missed some.

If I'd simply eaten the potatoes I planted, I would have gotten more potato than what I harvested. Not exactly my aim.

This weekend, I'll resift, in the daylight, and also look at the other plants. All of the store-bought plants but three are fading fast. I planted them Memorial Day weekend. They came up about three weeks later. So they're roughly three months old.

Did you chit them out before you planted them?

Probably not since I don't know what that means.

I have to admit it was pretty amazing to sift my fingers through dirt and come up with food that I caused to be there. Just because there was a tiny amount didn't make the process of digging them up any less wondrous.

I haven't done that since I was gardening with my grandmother, forty years ago. The potatoes did seem bigger back then, but maybe that's just because my hands were smaller. :-)

Chitting is sprouting the potatoes before you plant them.
Here is a link that shows the chitted potatoes:
http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/factsheets/gg9.php

I dug a trench, put the chitted potatoes at the bottom, covered all but the tops of the sprouts, then kept adding more compost as the vines grew up until level with the bed. That way you don't loose all potential growing time waiting for the vines to emerge.

http://www.farm-garden.com/growing-vegetables/potatoes

Ah. I didn't know it by that name, but yes. The seed potatoes were already sprouting when they arrived, and I let the store potatoes sprout before I planted them. I buried them 3-4 inches deep and then hilled them gradually as the stems grew higher.

Next time I'll hill them higher. Or I'll make a trench, bury the potatoes in the trench, then heap dirt from the ridges onto them until the hills and trenches reverse themselves.

And next time, I'll be able to plant in spring, although it won't be much earlier. I planted them May 31 this year. Last frost date for Colorado is May 20. A week and a half's difference.

There are several reasons for small potatoes. 1. the soil does not suit them them. Not enogh nutrients or if you had vines but no potatoes to high a ratio of nitrogen to to P and K.. 2. Planted too late for the maturity of the variety. Try to plant about 2 weeks before your last frost date or May 5 -10 in your case. I would suspect the soil tho. Except for extremely long season cultivars, they should have had time to mature from June to September. As an aside, planting store bought potatoes usually works fine. BUT may introduce a disease. That is why certified (disease free) seed potatoes are recommended. 3. Plants were stunted or stressed by the myriad of potao diseases including blights.
Also as an aside. I have never been able to observe any difference in yield or maturity between pre- sprouted (chitted) Irish potatoes and non sprouted potatoes. A lot of folks believe it gets earlier emergence, but does not appear to affect the crop in the long run.

Farmerdill, are you including yellow potatoes when you say "Irish potatoes". Not sure if you are using the Irish description to distinguish the white potatoes from sweet potatoes or if you are referring to a particular type of white potato.

Irish potatoes (Solanaceae Solanum tuberosum) come in many colors from pale white to red to blue to almost black

Sweet potatoes (Convolvulaceae Ipomoea batatas) also comes in multiple colors from white to red to purple. Flesh colors do not necessarily reflect skin color, they come in white, yellow, and orange.

Thanks. I thought that was what you meant. I've heard the term "Irish" potato used to mean a variety of things.

I went out to harvest today. The potatoes I already dug gave up a couple more, but they were the size of peas. I dug up another couple potato plants and got four more potatoes. They're small, about "new potato" size, but definitely big enough to eat. There were a couple more, but I left them in the ground since the potato plant wasn't quite dead, and the roots weren't dried up.

One of the potatoes had scratches across it from where the squirrels dug.

And I have four potential zucchini! I hope the blossoms get pollinated when they finally open.

So do you think the squirrels ran off with the rest of the potato crop?
Perhaps you could put some chicken wire over the top of the potato bed next year to make it difficult from them to dig through. We used to do that with the bulbs to keep them from getting the tulips and crocus.

The squirrels are definitely under suspicion. I don't know if they were burying nuts, going for the potatoes, or just digging to see if they could find something, but I wouldn't put it past them to steal my potatoes. I know they stole my squash seeds, and they probably ate my carrot, lettuce, and zucchini sprouts, too.

I'll be digging my potatoes this weekend.....if there are any in there to dig. I've noticed rodent holes just under the inside edge of the bed. I saw what looked like a field mouse scurry down a hole near the potatoes when I was searching in the green bean jungle. I'm hoping he found enough other items to munch on and left my potatoes alone.

That's why I'm hoping Mr. Grey keeps coming to my yard. He can lunch on my vegetable thieves all he wants.

We have a resident owl in the garden, which is probably why we haven't seen any squirrels. The mouse must have tunneled over to avoid the owl.

When you become a gardener, it puts all of those cute animated adventures with talking cats and mice and owls and whatnot in a WHOLE different light.

I'm eating my harvest right now. I don't know if it's just that it came from my garden or that it's less than three days old, but I don't remember potatoes ever tasting quite this good.

Yeah, I could really get into this gardening thing.

It becomes even more interesting when you start talking to all of the critters in the garden and they start to listen to you! :D
The mouse had nibbled on the first two of my Costaluto Genovese tomatoes to ripen to red. We picked them off and set them at the base of the plant. I spoke to the mouse hole and told him that I was willing to share, but would appreciate it if he would finish the tomatoes that he had started before nibbling on anything else. The next day those two tomatoes had been moved closer to the mouse hole, eaten a little bit further, and everything else in the garden was fine.

Gardenmermaid, wow.

I certainly don't have that kind of attunement with the critters in my yard. I tell them to stop digging up my plants, and they just don't listen.

Some of them listen and cooperate, some of them don't. I like to give them the opportunity for peaceful cooexistence first. The pigeons are too dumb or too ornery. I shoot them with a water pistol if they try to roost under my eve at night since they are willing to be housebroken and won't wear diapers.

My first ever post anywhere be kind. Bad luck with the tatty harvest. I have just planted my very first veg garden and a friend donated some old potatoes from the bottom of her fridge. I was not hopeful but they were sprouting and I thought whynot. However 9 weeks later we had loads of potatoes, even though I forgot to earth up until plants were a bit big and it has been exceptionally dry in the UK this year. Begginers luck I think.

Congratulations on your potato harvest valmot!
Beginner's luck perhaps, but don't sell yourself short. I hope you are blessed with some good soil and the UK is not as dry as the American west.

Yeah, I was pretty much trying to grow potatoes in moondust.

But I haven't dug up the All Blue yet. They're still green and healthy, so I'll leave them until they aren't.

I hope I am wrong, but I never found All Blue to be a very productive potato compared to the more common ones. I hope your experience proves me wrong, but, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said you were trying to grow potatoes in moon dust. That's what we all start with in the Rocky Mountains. The more organic matter you add, the better all of your crops will do. It is unbelievable how much organic matter it takes to get a prize winning crop, but you will see as you add more year after year. The more organic matter the bigger your veggies and the better they repel insects.
I commend you on not giving up. You have proved you can grow things in your soil. Now all you have to do is apply more organic matter and perhaps some rock phosphate or bone meal and each year your veggies will be larger and more lush. Winter is coming on now and next spring you can start over again. Try some herbs, especially mint and oregano. They are very tolerant of poor soil, good for the body, and can be used in many dishes.

I simply couldn't resist something as off the wall as a blue potato. Next year I'll definitely try other varieties. And I'll continue to amend the soil each time I plant.

I did try some herbs this time, without much success. I'll keep trying. I'll definitely plant catnip, to keep my "garden cop" around if nothing else.

I'm also going to be putting in some raised beds with bagged garden soil and compost. Would be interesting to do some comparison gardening between garden soil and "moondust."

We had "moondust" in the Sierras and now have adobe clay here in the bay area. Both are like black holes when it comes to adding organic matter in the first few years. We added 27 cu feet of compost to the top 12 inches of a 50 sq ft bed. I still bent my trowel when I tried to dig a hole without watering first!