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Wednesday, June 9

Experiments in Potatoes

I bought some frou-frou potatoes a couple months ago. The kind that come in the special burlap bag so that the spuds are fooled into thinking they've never left the ground. These were platinum-members-only potatoes. So I couldn't be surprised when they began to sprout before I had a chance to use them.
But instead of being annoyed at my wasteful spending and inefficient meal-planning, I decided to try to grow them.  I don't have room in the garden for the type of mounding that's recommended, but in my research I ran across the concept of potato grow bags. Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures from the very beginning, but here's a shot from a couple weeks ago:
 
I started out with 2 inches of dirt and laid the cut-up sprouted potatoes on top.  Then, as the plants grew a couple inches, I mounded more dirt on them until the plant was barely showing.  The bag pretty quickly filled up. And the picture this morning looks like this:
 
(Hand is for scale and to show-off a new OPI color I found)
I think now I need to wait until the flowers die off before opening the velcro flap on the backside of the bag and checking for my bounty.  The plants look pretty happy, but who knows what's happening in the dirt?  More to come....

2 comments:

  1. Great pics, Jo! Thanks!
    Questions: Are they going to be small potatoes? How many sprouts did you put in the one container? After you open the container to check on them, can you fasten it back up if need be?

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  2. Not sure how big the potatoes will be. I planted 5 'eyes' from potatoes that had sprouted themselves on the kitchen table. I opened the container today and saw a bunch of roots and a bunch of ants. It was too wet to look around more. I'll do that this weekend and post the results.

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