Homegrown: My Potato Harvest

You probably know that I like to grow my own food as much as possible, and this summer just gone, I tried my hand at growing potatoes in the garden. I've never grown them before so it was a bit of an experiment for me, inspired by Wilma next door with her massive mounds of dirt and sprawling potato plants [and 40+ years experience...]. So I got my hands on a $2 bag of seed potatoes from a farmers market in late October, and ended up planting out 17 seed potatoes.

Anyway they all eventually sprouted, and grew in to lovely lush plants. Not as big as Wilma's mind, but hey, in years to come I think they will be [as our soil improves, the more we condition it]. I cared for them lovingly, and piled up extra pea straw around the plants to provide extra coverage for the potatoes growing close to the surface, so they wouldn't get exposed to light and go green. And Charles did most of the watering to keep them alive and well in the heat, when my motivation was lacking.

We've had a couple of tasters now, where we would sacrifice a plant here and there and dig up all the potatoes from the soil under it. Some of them were huge. And they tasted really good, really very different from store bought potatoes. I couldn't tell you what variety we actually planted out because I don't know, but they are beautifully soft and creamy when cooked. And the really big guys are great for making potato chips [fries] with. And I made these Crispy Sage Potatoes with Fried Eggs to feed the in laws [I can say that now] - divine.

Apart from the odd small harvest though, I had just let the plants go. A few reasons for this - the physical work started to be much harder on my body with this growing belly, and the relentless heat had me cowering inside, and the total lack of rain was leaving the ground baked like clay. Actually that's exactly what it was, baked clay. Not good for digging in. But I finally thought I'd better go out and harvest what I could. I left it a bit late really, some losses to bugs and grubs but it's still a good harvest.

At a guesstimate [which is part actual and part made up] I'd say we've come in with around 20kg of potatoes. As in, I was weighing the harvests and keeping a list to get a total for the season, but right now there is a massive bag of potatoes and I'm not in the mood for weighing them. It was hard enough digging them all up. And some of those are green, so they can't be eaten [can you pick it in the image above?] and some have been munched on by garden critters. But there are again some really big, good looking potatoes!

What I want to know is, is it possible, or even desirable, to grow enough of our own potatoes to be able to sustain ourselves through the winter? How many potato plants would we have to have in order to achieve this? Is it something that would be worth doing? And I'm assuming we would be able to store them appropriately. What did people do before mass production farming? I would love to be able to grow enough to not have to buy store potatoes ever. Without turning into a full time potato farmer in the process.

Do you grow your own? Have you got any tips to share?