Gardeners' Holidays 2019: The Changing of the Garden

I was unable to put this blog entry out on the actual winter solstice, yesterday, because Brian and I spent that day in our car, making our way across parts of five states on our annual winter trek to Indianapolis. But, as usual, we took advantage of this one-on-one time to go through the new Fedco seed catalogue and decide which of our garden crops we wanted to keep, drop, or replace next year.

I thought this conversation would be a pretty short one this year, since most of the crops we've grown this year were pretty successful. Running down the list—arugula, regular basil, Thai basil, cucumbers, dill, two kinds of green beans, leeks, three kinds of lettuce, marigolds, parsley, two kinds of peppers, scallions, snap peas, two kinds of butternut squash, and four kinds of tomatoes—we found that most of them had provided decent yields and given us very little trouble. We found only a few that we thought we'd like to replace, such as the new King Sieg leeks, which produced only a few scrawny specimens. Rather than go back to our previous Lincoln variety, which was never a big producer either, we're taking another stab at finding a better variety—most likely the autumn-producing Lancelot, which is billed as "a dependable heavy-yielding, virus-tolerant bolt-resistant leek." We're keeping both our trusty Carmen peppers and our new Cabellero chilis, but we're dropping the old Jimmy Nardellos (which didn't even give us one healthy seedling) in favor of a new frying pepper, most likely the early-producing Takara Shishito.

Among our tomatoes, we're keeping the Premio for early production, the Pineapple for late-season production, and the Sun Gold for tons of tiny cherry tomatoes all season long. However, we're dropping the other cherry variety, Honeydrop; it was indeed less prone to cracking than the Sun Gold, but not quite as tasty and not nearly as productive. And we're definitely dropping the Heinz paste tomato, which produced only a meager crop of small tomatoes, barely enough for one good batch of sauce. We've identified two candidates for a paste tomato to replace it: Opalka, touted for "copious yields" and ability to withstand hot, dry summers, and Vilms, a massive producer resistant to many tomato diseases. However, given that Heinz is the second or third plum tomato we've tried without success, I'm not getting my hopes up too much.

So I thought those minor changes would be it for next year's garden. Then, however, Brian threw me a curve. He said that next year, he'd like to try adding an entirely new crop to our repertoire: potatoes.

Brian's newfound interest in potatoes was motivated less by a desire to eat them—since, after all, they're readily available and pretty cheap at the supermarket—than by curiosity about how to grow them. He has a coworker who grows potatoes in his garden, and his descriptions of the process piqued Brian's interest. Plus, he says half-jokingly, being able to grow a crop that can actually supply a reasonable amount of our daily calories will come in handy during the global-warming-induced End Times.

However, when I turned to the "Potatoes" section in the Fedco catalog, it looked like we'd hit a snag. I read through the section on potato culture, and the way they described it made it sound like this crop requires a lot more work than most of the veggies we grow. You have to plant at just the right time, when the soil is at 55 to 60 degrees and dry enough to work easily; and earlier or later, and you risk having your seed potatoes rot in the ground. You're supposed to plant them four to six inches deep, then "hill them up" (mounding dirt over the stem, so it can turn into a tuber underground) when they reach 6 inches tall and again at 12 to 15 inches tall. And you have to water them consistently, an inch or so each week. And ideally, you should give them a good coating of mulch after the second hilling to keep them moist and control weeds. And you have to wait two to three weeks after the vines die before harvesting them, and keep them chilly—55 to 60 degrees—for several weeks before putting them into storage in exactly the right conditions: 38 to 40 degrees, 85 to 90 percent humidity, and complete darkness.

But the most serious problem was the amount of space needed. The minimum amount of seed potatoes you can buy from Fedco is two pounds, and according to the catalogue, each pound will fill 5 to 8 "row feet"—so to grow our potatoes in the traditional way, we'd need a minimum of 10 feet, and up to 16 feet, of potato hills. In our tiny square-foot garden, that just wasn't going to be an option.

Fortunately, we'd both heard of other ways to grow potatoes in containers, such as barrels or bags. I pulled out my phone and Googled "grow potatoes small space," and I found several articles about these methods. One, from A Modern Homestead, was very enthusiastic about the "potato tower" method: making a cylinder of chicken wire, lining it with newspaper and mulch, and planting your potatoes in that. The writers claimed this method could produce "hundreds of pounds of potatoes in less than 30 square feet." This seemed a bit iffy to me, given that Fedco said you needed to plant your potatoes at least 8 inches apart for fingerling varieties and 10 to 12 inches apart for full-size ones. However, the Ontario Potato Board was more optimistic, saying you only needed to space the seed potatoes 5 to 7 inches apart. It also said you can use other kinds of containers, such as a burlap bag, a garbage can, or any tall container with drainage holes drilled in the bottom.

Now, as it happens, Brian and I already have some large buckets with drainage holes in them: the ones we used as tree-watering buckets when we first planted our plum trees. According to Instructables, each of these should hold about three potato plants, so with five buckets, we could accommodate fifteen plants, or just about two pounds' worth. We're not going to attempt anything on a bigger scale than that just yet.

As for which variety of potato to grow, Fedco sorted its offerings into four types: early, mid-season, late, and fingerling. We confined our search to the fingerling type, since we've found this type of potato to be both particularly tasty and particularly expensive to buy. Fedco had nine fingerling potatoes on offer, with intriguing names and descriptions such as the deep purple Magic Molly, the red-fleshed AmaRosa, and the Austrian Crescent, with its "unearthly yields" of pale yellow potatoes up to ten inches long. The best one for newbies like us appeared to be the Pinto, described as a "real workhorse with high yields and excellent resistance to pests and disease. They're pretty, too, with "striking bicolor skins" of yellow and red, and their flavor is described as "buttery and decadent with a creamy texture." For a first experiment with potato growing, it sounds like a sure winner.

So, as our 2019 garden settles in for the winter, we're looking ahead to another year of doing more of the same stuff that worked so well this year—plus a little something new that may or may not work. Only one way to find out!