Gardening experimenting

 Way back in the late winter and early spring I was watching a bunch of how-to gardening videos on you-tube. What a rabbit hole that is!! Anyhow, some of them were about planting potatoes in pots rather than garden beds. We have a Kawartha dairy place that does a huge business selling ice cream and they give their empty 3 gallon tubs away for free, so I thought, why not try it. Today is harvesting day. The plant tops are yellow and dying back, which according to all those videos I watched, means that the potatoes are ready. The buckets have been sitting on the upstairs deck all summer where they got lots of sun and lots of rain. Back in the spring I bought a bag of seed potatoes. I think it may have been a 1 kg bag. Anyhow, after all the pots were emptied, this is our results. I weighed them and it came out to 10 pounds. I’d previously emptied a few more buckets which gave us enough for a meal. So our total yield was perhaps 12-15 pounds. Not that great for all the work that went into it. Each bucket was planted with a seed potato with 2 or 3 eyes on it, as recommended in the videos. Out of each bucket we averaged 2-3 good sized potatoes. So we maybe tripled what we planted. It was a fun experiment and fun to watch the plants grow. We didn’t have enough space in the raised beds to do potatoes, so the buckets were the only option. There is talk of building a few more raised beds next spring, so maybe next year we can try them in a garden bed and see if the yield is better. On the very up side, they do taste way better than store bought.