Dreaming of Spring Potatoes
Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 1:45PM 
As the snow around the greenhouse reaches the four foot mark and it seems all hope of growing anything is lost....an idea. OK, it was not my idea. Truthfully, I can not remember where I read the idea to try this. That being said, if whoever had the idea is one of the few but lucky who actually read this post, I will give you all the credit.
In our root cellar, some of our potatoes have begun to sprout. Some have 5 or 6 eyes and seem like they really are itching to be planted, so, I decided to plant them. Now I did not want to take up any of the limited but valuable greenhouse space for what would be months. Not to mention the other half of Hook Mountain Growers was determined to plant the rest of the lettuce seedlings in every available inch of space. So I decided to take on an experiment. As I said previously, I saw this written by someone, somewhere on some website. 
I found two large buckets about 18 inches wide by 16 inches high. They were actually left over from a delivery of evergreens many years ago. So after scrounging around for some good soil to place in the buckets....not an easy task when the ground is frozen...I finally found enough to load both buckets up. After filling the buckets 2/3rds of the way to the top it was time to plant. I found what looked like the healthiest potatoes in the root cellar, cut them into pieces with at least two eyes on each and planted 3 in each bucket. If you have not grown potatoes before, the reason I only filled the buckets up 2/3rds of the way was so that I could hill, or basically put more soil covering the plant, after it reaches about 8-10 inches in height. Often the potato will grow many of its tubers in this hilled up area. Both buckets were then placed in a sunny area, doused with a nutrient drench and told I would like them to produce 12 pounds of potatoes each.
If they were listening, we should have beautiful Adirondack Red and Blue potatoes ready for eating in the late spring. We shall see.....
Pam
8 days later - we have potatoes popping up! We'll keep you posted as the experiment goes on....
Reader Comments (1)
I grew potatoes this way before! I didn't have enough room in my fenced garden a couple of years ago, so I did the same thing, in big black buckets outside the garden. That thwarted the groundhogs from their ever curious destructive behavior... now if I could only do this with Pumpkins!
Nice blog, I'd love to see your micro farm one day. I'll meet you at the Clarkstwon E Summit.