Sustainable Eats

I finally got around to planting my potatoes (late of course). Potatoes are a fun thing to grow with kids and a great thing for someone with minimal yard space to grow. You can even grow them on a patio or balcony.

You can buy seed potatoes at most garden shops or through seed catalogs. Or you can buy eating potatoes from a trustworthy organic farmer and hope they don’t have any diseases that might contaminate your soil for future plants in the same family as potatoes (like tomatoes for instance). Once you buy your potatoes you put them in a brown paper bag in a dark place for a few weeks until they sprout. A garage is perfect. Non-organic potatoes won’t sprout, by the way, because they’ve been gassed to keep them from sprouting on you. That’s in addition to the pesticides they have. Nice, eh?

Once your potatoes sprout you can cut them into pieces, being sure each section contains 2-3 eyes.

You can grow potatoes by simply putting them in the ground but then you need a larger area, and you have to dig them up and hunt through the dirt to find them all.

It’s much easier if you use something like a large container, chicken wire, or a burlap bag. You can probably find used bags by emailing a coffee roaster – they often also have spent coffee grounds which are good added to veggie compost piles.

You want to put a layer of straw, dirt, sand or mulch down and then gently place your spuds with the plant parts pointing up. Cover those with a layer of your growing medium and water.

When the plants grow above the dirt level you once again add a layer of dirt. This process will repeat until you reach the top of your growing container. This is called “hilling” potatoes. It encourages the potato plant to produce more tubers in each layer.

In the fall when the plant dies down you can start digging up your potatoes.

I have also seen instructions for building a wooden box with slats on the side so that you can remove the lower slats in order to harvest the new potatoes without disturbing the plant. A nifty idea but it does require more effort to build the box and then you need to store it and clean it well between growing seasons so you don’t risk contaminating next year’s crop or attracting pests – crop rotation is a critical part of organic farming.

For more complete growing instructions, as well as instructions on making your own potato box visit Sinfonian’s Square Foot Garden, a great Seattle area gardening blog.

And here those same potatoes are on May 6, ready for a new layer of dirt so they can make another layer of potatoes in my burlap bags.