Our potato planting premiere

As I mentioned back in December, Brian and I are attempting to grow potatoes for the first time this year. And not only are these a completely new crop for us, but so is the method we're using to grow them. Rather than attempting to make space (a lot of it) for potato hills in our garden beds, we're going to be growing them in five-gallon buckets. This method will allow us to keep adding more dirt on top of the potato vines as they grow, thus maximizing the amount that's underground producing tubers, without disturbing the rest of the plants in the garden.

We originally planned to buy our seed potatoes from Fedco along with the rest of our seed order in January, but this turned out not to be feasible. The minimum amount of any potato variety you can buy from Fedco is two pounds, which is way more than we'd ever be able to plant in our miniature bucket garden. So we moved to Plan B, which was to pick up a handful of whatever seed potato looked most appetizing at the Belle Mead Co-Op whenever we went to load up on mulch in the spring. And, luckily, we were just in time to do this, hitting the store on the last day before our governor shut down all non-essential businesses in the state. (Actually, according to the Co-Op's website, it is still open, but operating under very severe restrictions — which is probably just as well, considering how crowded it was the day we went there.)

The potatoes we selected are a fingerling variety that I don't know the exact name of (the receipt from the Co-Op just says "Potato Seed Fingerling"). The clerk at the Co-Op said that for the type of planting we had planned, we'd probably want one potato per bucket, cut into thirds, so we bought just four potatoes — a little less than a pound — for $3.71. Brian prepped them for planting by keeping them in the shop in a bag, open to let air circulate, but covered with a cardboard box to block out light. After about four weeks of this treatment, they had sprouted long green shoots — incipient potato vines — from multiple eyes.

Yesterday, he deemed them ready to plant and got started preparing the buckets. He'd consulted instructions on various sites online, and they all agreed that the first step was to drill multiple drainage holes in the bottoms of the buckets. The three buckets that had previously served as tree waterers already had a couple of small holes each, but he expanded significantly on that, drilling 1/4-inch holes roughly 3 inches apart all the way around the base.

Next, he added a layer of gravel to the bottom of each bucket. This step further improves the drainage, preventing the tubers from becoming soggy and starting to rot int he buckets. He had already amassed a small pile of pebbles outside the garden while he was clearing a spot in a corner of the back yard to plant some pawpaw seedlings (which are still alive, if tiny), so he used all of those, plus all the ones I'd saved in a bucket in the shed for possible landscaping use, plus a few fragments of concrete left over from our patio project that we fished out of the back corner of the yard. With all this material, we were able to line each bucket to a depth of about 1 1/2 inches.

Some sets of instructions said that you should add a layer of plastic, such as a garbage bag, on top of the gravel, with holes poked in the bottom for drainage. However, not all the instructions included this step, and the ones that did never actually explained what it was for. So, to keep our setup as simple as possible, we skipped it and layered compost directly over the gravel, somewhere between 4 and 6 inches deep. The compost had come out of our bin, so we only had a limited amount to work with, but we still have a bag of Black Kow composted manure (tested and found negative for killer compost) that we can supplement with as the vines grow. We then cut up each potato into three pieces and set them into the compost, more or less evenly spaced, with the stems pointing up.

We covered these seed potatoes with a final inch or two of compost and placed the buckets inside the garden enclosure, where our resident groundhog (which made its first public appearance of the year today) can't get at them. So that the buckets wouldn't get in our way as we moved about the garden, we placed one in each corner other than the one where the gate is, plus one more in the corner farthest from the gate. Now all we have to do is keep them watered and top them up with compost every time the green shoots start to poke above the level of the soil. If all goes well, this fall we should be able to harvest close to 10 pounds of potatoes from our four buckets — not enough to make a substantial dent in our grocery bill, but enough for a few good, tasty meals. And, more importantly, it will prove that this method is feasible, so if we want to ramp up our potato production in future years, all we'll need to do is pick up a few more buckets.

And if it turns out not to work, oh well — it didn't take up any of our valuable garden real estate, so all we're out is four bucks for the potatoes.