Smaller and larger potatoes

So, remember how we harvested our first bucket of potatoes last month, and the total potato content inside came to roughly one ounce? And how I concluded that if the other three were equally disappointing, our harvest would come to only four ounces total?

Well, they were and they weren't. Brian harvested the other three buckets today and laid out the contents of all four buckets for comparison. The contents appear here in the same relative positions as their buckets in the garden. The two piles at the upper left were from the two buckets at the northeast corner of the garden, the tiny pile at the upper right was in the southeast corner, and the one at the bottom left was in the northwest corner. However, it actually got far more light than all the others, as the other three are all partly shaded by trees. That's presumably why it yielded so much more than the others, and probably also why it was the only one of the four buckets that still had some living greenery in it.

This gives us another useful piece of data: potato plants apparently need significantly more light than ours were getting. So, along with the other changes we plan to make with next year's crop (placing the potatoes directly atop the drainage stones, mixing soil with the compost, sprouting fewer potatoes, raising the buckets for better drainage, and watering more thoroughly after planting), we'll want to find a place for the buckets where they'll get as much light as possible. Brian was concerned that if we moved them outside the fenced garden area, the groundhogs would go for them, but Laid Back Gardener claims they don't, which makes sense if they're a member of the generally toxic nightshade family. So perhaps we'll try putting the buckets along the edge of the patio instead (possibly dressing them up with burlap to make them look a bit nicer).

The two other buckets on the eastern side of the garden barely doubled the harvest from the first one, but the fourth bucket, the one from the western side, increased it considerably. When Brian weighed the contents of all four buckets together on our kitchen scale, he found that we had a total of roughly eight ounces — about twice as much as I expected to get, and exactly the right amount to make a nice batch of roasted Brussels sprouts with potatoes and eggs for tonight's dinner.

So, all in all, our potato-growing experiment was not a total failure. True, the half-pound of potatoes we actually harvested would only have cost us about a buck to buy at the store, as opposed to $3.71 worth of seed potatoes and a whole season of work tending the plants. But we'll get one good meal out of it, and plenty of useful information about what to do differently next year.