Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Potato Bins

Sometime earlier I mentioned that I planted our potatoes in bins (you can see earlier photos here and here) so that they wouldn't use up much garden space.  I love how these work and I've been meaning to post some photos of these and am finally making time to do so. 
I planted several seed potatoes in the bottom of each bin and then filled the bin as the plant grew.  I had wanted to use straw or leaves as the mulch but, since I didn't have enough, I ended up using dirt (leaves are like gold around here). The best thing about these (to me, anyway) is the ease of harvesting.  Once I push the cage aside the boys can easily start picking potatoes. 
Next year I'd really love to keep up with mulching with straw or leaves - less dirt on the potatoes that way.  And there's one of the fun things about gardening - you're barely done for the year and already looking for ways to improve next year's garden.
So, of course, we've been enjoying lots of potatoes lately. Last week I made a potato crusted quiche (with cherry tomatoes and nettle!) and it was delicious (shown here before pouring the egg on top so you can see the crust).
And with the amount of potatoes we have I expect to be enjoying home fries, baked potatoes, scalloped potatoes, roast potatoes,  mashed potatoes, hashbrowns...

10 comments:

AMOffenwanger said...

Oh, cool! I'd missed your earlier posts on this. Now you got me thinking... hmmm...

AMOffenwanger said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
daisy g said...

Oooooh, that looks dee-lish!

Love how you are always trying to improve your gardening skills!

busy little bee said...

This reminds me of when I was a little girl. After my grandfather dug up the potatoes I would go along and pick up the tiny potatoes that he left. Then I was allowed to boil them in a little pot. Those potatoes always tasted the best. Thanks for the smile!

Alison said...

It is good to see how they should work! My potatos in pots have not been great for the last few years and this year was a disaster, the summer was so wet everything rotted!
Maybe next year!
Alison
x

donna!ee said...

oh wow...THANK YOU MUCH for sharing this process. we usually plant potatoes in a row but this year we had no harvest due to not being able to get to them to tend to them. this is the perfect solution, again, thank you! :)

Laeli said...

I love the look of that crust, great idea!

Katherine said...

Brillian way to grow taters. Much, much easier than digging them up, I'm thinking.

Another mouth watering dish. How cruel that you live too far away for me to pop in and have a taste. ;o(

Erin said...

I might try this next year, as we have variable success with our potatoes, harvest size-wise. This year was terrible and I am sad that they are nearly used up now. We had so few and I'm not clear what went wrong aside from some watering mis-communications where they were stressed for a bit. I like saving space too, and we have the wire on hand. We are also planning to use this same wire as a layer over our leaves over our garlic (which we hope to plant very soon). The leaves provide a nice cozy blanket, and the wire laid over top keeps the leaves from blowing away, as well as critters away from the bulbs. I like the way you make your beds, they look lovely!!

~Erin xo

Erin said...

What a great idea! Will be trying this out next year! Planning on planting around 200 plants next year- we have already ate most of our canned potatoes!