Recycled potatoes

Last year we planted some seed potatoes as well as some organic potatoes from the store that had sprouted and were ready to compost. We figured we had nothing to lose.

It turned out, we had everything to gain. We had a great yield from our recycled potatoes so, when our red potatoes sprouted, we kept them to try it again.

Clarence has been reading about some garden techniques that we've never used before. One of the ideas involves laying wet newspapers on the ground and planting potatoes on top. We decided to give it a whirl.

I didn't have much newspaper for him but I had a bunch of paper Meijer bags I was anxious to recycle. They are shorter than standard grocery bags so I generally find them annoying to use for other purposes. I hoped they would work well after we used up the newspaper. They did! Clarence found them much easier to work with than the wet newspaper.

He also read some opinions that planting whole potatoes, rather than cutting them, produces larger potatoes for harvest. He decided to try that, too.

He had some old straw he used last year to form a "bin" around a compost pile. He recycled that straw to cover the potatoes. I've been disappointed in years past to grow organic potatoes and still have to peel them because I can't get all the grit scrubbed off the skin. We're hoping that growing them in straw will be successful, so that they are cleaner when harvested.

This post is participating in Teaching Good Things From Seeds to Harvest.