Potatoes Part One

I decided to give potatoes another go this year.  I never seem to have much luck growing them despite soil amendments, growing techniques, etc.  I always ended up with hardly any potatoes that were small and just not that great.  This year I decided to try to grow them in large fabric-like bags specifically designed for growing potatoes.  They are the Jumbo Potato Bags from Gardener's Supply Company. The reviews were quite good and apparently people get nice potatoes out of these things!  So off I went to get some good organic fertilizer, soil to fill the bags, and of course my seed potatoes.  I decided to grow four varieties this year, Kathadin (white), Red Pontiac (redskin), Yukon Gem (yellow), and Purple Majesty (purple-skinned).  The idea of these bags is you start by putting about 4 inches of your soil into the bags along with about a cup of fertilizer.  The sides of the bags have been folded down half way and as the potatoes grow they get unfolded.  They're made out of this polyester felt-like material that allows for water drainage and soil aeration.  I got them in blue...my favorite color.  Here is the soil/fertilizer mix.  I used a good quality top soil/compost/peat mixture I mixed myself.

I just mixed all this together and smoothed it out.  Then I put all the seed potatoes in the bags.  Think about if you've left a bag of potatoes from the store in the cupboard for too long.  You come back to them eventually and they've all sprouted.  Well, these are now seed potatoes and you could plant those for new potatoes a few months later if you wanted to!  Here is my very dirty hand holding one on the Purple Majesties.  Even the sprouts on it are purple!

So, I got all the potatoes arranged in the soil so they weren't too close to each other.  Here you can see what they looked like before I covered them with the next layer of soil.

The potatoes at this point were ready to be covered with another 4 inches of soil.  Again some organic fertilizer was mixed in.  Potatoes like to feed!  Not too much nitrogen though.  You'll get a lot of green leafy growth, but you won't get too many potatoes.  The instructions that came with the growing bags said that for every eight inches of leafy growth add four more inches of soil until you've filled the bags with soil.  So that's what I did until the bags were full!  The potatoes poked their leaves out of the soil within a few days and they've just grown at warp-speed since then.  I should add that I got them planted back on May 14.  They finally seem to have leveled out now here that it's July as they're putting all their energy into growing new potatoes.  Or that's what SHOULD be happening!  Here they are a couple days ago.

Once the tops have basically died down it'll be time to dump out the bags and unearth what I'm hoping will be a lot of nice colorful potatoes!  Obviously I'll be sure to get pictures and let everyone know how this experiment in potato growing goes.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!