I have been growing container potatoes since April. This might seem ridiculous since we have a large garden but none of it was developed or prepared when it was time for planting and back then I was still on hopping between crutches and wheelchair so container potatoes seemed the way to go.
Problem was I didn’t have any containers deep enough and 4 euro seemed a bit pricey for a grow bag that basically was little more than an old coal sack – I was hoping to plant at least a dozen of them which would have made the price of potatoes very high.
APOCALYPSE
I realized that there was little difference between the grow bag and old coal sacks. I have a very a slight tendency to hoard stuff that ‘might come in useful’ in an apocalypse situation so I had lots and lots of old coal sacks handy and I’m sure there won’t be an apocalypse any time soon.
CONTAINER POTATOES WITHOUT THE CONTAINERS
Anyway, we filled them with compost and in went the seed potatoes. I chose ‘British Queens’ as they are the floury variety that we like.
It was all very easy and himself was especially delighted not to have to dig (he still has nightmares about the hard work he put into planting spuds in 2010 only to see them all the little potatoes flowing down the road in a river of rain due to floods!)
No hard work or digging this time. We parked these sacks of spuds outside the back of the house where they remained until a month or so ago when we got a little greenhouse/lean-to built and we had to move them over to a new spot beside the shed. One of the bags was torn and basically spilled its guts during the move but we sort of shoved the soil and plants back in and hoped for the best.
NATIONAL POTATO DAY
Anyway, since it is National Potato Day I decided to join in the excitement by emptying out the torn bag to see if there was anything worth eating. I am leaving the others where they are in the hope they will continue to grow for a while longer.
I must admit none of our potatoes were treated with a shovel load of TLC or manure. We did put a handful of seaweed in each sack and later we fed them with my own homemade seaweed tea.
To be honest even container potatoes need a bit more love than we gave, but there were too many jobs going on at the same time for us and while I was still recovering from an accident and hobbling around on crutches I got a bit overwhelmed. The most we ever did was shove the hose in the bags to give them a soaking during a rare but welcome little heat wave.
I must admit I did pause for a second to wonder if potato neglecters such as us even deserve to celebrate National Potato Day. Nah… how could we miss that?
THE POTATO AND THE SPOON RACE
So, I emptied the sacks into the wheelbarrow and raked it through with my hands and lo and behold I found an assortment of tiny spuds. Now, when I say tiny, I mean tiny! I’m talking candidates for the potato on a spoon race. If there even is such a thing.
I am sure that there are better ways to grow container potatoes than my way but never mind, I did what I could at the time and I’m kinda happy with the results.
You can see there aren’t many potatoes, and to make them look even more wholesome for the photo I gave this colander an Aladdin-ish rub with my sleeve and piled the spuds in. I think they look quite tasty in the shiny colander.
We are going to have our potatoes with some freshly caught mackerel kindly given to us by our neighbours who had a bit of a fish glut after a happy fishing expedition where ‘not one got away.’ Lucky for us!
Anyway this was my little contribution to National Potato Day – hope you have a good one!
Grace
If you would like to learn more about how to grow vegetables click here.
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