Havesting potatoes

So here it is November, and we finally have the results of our experiment of growing potatoes in potato bags.

We tried this our second summer in our new place, and the results were a disaster, largely because of poor placement and poor soil.

Tucked in this area behind a shed, the bags were simply too difficult to get to. Lesson learned: the bags need access from both sides. When one row was tucked against the shed wall, that row was too difficult to maintain (including topping with fresh soil as the potatoes grew). That experiment also failed because the soil was too clay-y.

So last summer, I transferred the bags to a different location, near the two original strawberry beds in the driveway. I arranged the bags on pallets and made an "H" pattern so they could be accessed from all sides. This worked much better.

I also used better soil: a combination of dirt, compost, and sand blended together, which made the growing medium much more friable.

The potatoes grew beautifully. I topped them off once, filling the bags to the top with dirt, to encourage the potatoes to sprout additional tubers. This is what the plants looked like in June.

By August, things had died back a little, but they were still growing well.

In late October, ahead of an imminent freeze, Don and I went ahead and harvested the bags.

All these months when the potatoes seemed to be growing so well, we had no idea what was happening out of sight below the dirt level. Would the bags be empty? Packed? We didn't know.

We pulled the dirt out shovel-ful by shovel-ful, dumping the dirt into the Gorilla cart and tossing the harvested potatoes into tubs.

Harvesting was much easier than we expected since the dirt was so lovely and friable. We emptied the bags until we could lift the half-empty bags into the cart and dump the rest of the dirt, then pawed around pulling the remainder of the potatoes out.

The dirt is valuable, but we didn't want to use it again for potatoes since there's a chance we could spread potato diseases. So every three bags or so, we dumped the dirt from the Gorilla cart into the tractor bucket...

...then Don drove around to the still-unfinished garden space and dumped the dirt into an empty bed. Waste not, want not.

Bag by bag, we dug up potatoes...

...making piles of the empty bags as we went. (We let these dry out for a few days before storing them for the winter.)

We also removed the pallets as we went.

The results? Mixed. We harvested about 100 lbs. of potatoes from 20 grow bags, or about five pounds of potatoes per bag.

On one hand, we were disappointed. The YouTube videos I watched on growing potatoes in grow bags made it sound like harvesting 20 lbs. of potatoes per bag was routine. Our measly five pounds was a bit disheartening.

On the other hand, 100 lbs. of potatoes is nothing to sneeze at!

Now we were tasked with finding a way to store the potatoes through the winter. The house is too warm, the barn is too cold. We compromised by storing the potatoes in the shed where the well is located, and in which we keep a small heater going in very cold weather. This keeps the shed no colder than 33F.

Because this shed gets a fair number of mice, Don built a wire box using hardware cloth, which has a mesh too small for mice to get through. We padded the bottom with a generous layer of straw.

We layered the potatoes with the straw, making sure the potatoes were only one layer deep.

Between each layer of potatoes, we put a generous layer of straw.

By the time we were done, the bin was filled pretty much to the top.

We packed the rest of the available space with straw...

...and then Don placed the custom-made lid onto the cage to keep the mice out.

So the Big Question is, will we use the grow bags again?

Yes and no. We have them, so we'll continue to use them. As I said, 100 lbs. of potatoes is nothing to sneeze at.

But we're also going to revert to growing in beds rather than towers. In our old garden, I never "mounded" my indeterminant potatoes; we simply planted and later harvested, and had no complaints about the return on our investment.

Interestingly, I came across a post on the internet entitled "Do Potato Towers Work?" questioning all the bountiful claims made about potato towers of various types (cages, stackable units, tires, etc.). As the writer (her name is Ananda) put it, there were lots of pretty pictures, but a curious silence about the harvests.

"We have all seen those potato towers with incredible promises like 'grow 100 pounds of potatoes in 4 square feet!'" she wrote. "But have you seen an ACTUAL example of a productive potato tower? No. We tried it. It failed to produce more potatoes than we planted. Every video, book, and blog articles we looked through ( a LOT ) all started with great enthusiasm and ended with no updates on harvest, or completely disappointing results admitted by a few brave souls."

So we'll continue to use the grow bags, which gave us a decent-if-not-spectacular harvest. Additionally, since we'll have our garden up and running next spring, we'll plant in trenches in the garden beds and call it good.