Tag Archives: potatoes

Growing Potatoes in a Bucket

This was the year of fighting with gophers. They kept attacking and eating all of my potato and tomato plants’ roots. They would eat all the roots and leave the poor remaining green top of the plant on the ground. It was so sad to find this every morning. I tried everything to keep them out but to no avail. So I put the remaining potato plants in big buckets.

Growing potatoes in a bucket

Here is a photo of one of the potato plants I saved. They seemed to grow okay in the buckets but not a lot of room for them. When the plants were done growing and dried up, I just turned the buckets over and shook out the potatoes. The harvest was not too great but I did manage to get some small potatoes from growing them in buckets.

I figured it was better to get some small potatoes this year rather than just leaving them in the ground for the gophers to eat. So this is my useful idea for saving potato plants if you are facing a similar problem.

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Strange Growing Potatoes

Have you ever had strange growing potatoes? I discovered these mutant looking potatoes when I dug up a patch of potatoes in my back garden this Fall. These were planted later this year and apparently didn’t get enough water.

Strange Shaped Potatoes

I researched what the cause of these strange growing potatoes and found that they were stressed. Stressed potatoes don’t grow properly. The tubers stop growing and don’t spread out causing the potatoes to grow together such as these potatoes did.

Long periods of dry, hot weather without enough rain and lack of watering is mainly the cause. There are also some other reasons that you get can strange growing potatoes as shown in this gardening article. This summer was very hot and we didn’t get much rain so this stressed out my potatoes.

When you get mutant growing potatoes like this, your harvest will be much smaller as I can attest to. While this late planting of potatoes did produce some potatoes, my overall harvest was smaller than last year. I learned a valuable lesson and will share a useful tip, water more to prevent this!

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Early Potatoes

Here is my first harvest from the early potatoes I planted this year. These were grown from some leftover little potatoes from last year’s crop that I planted early this spring.

First Harvest Potatoes

I was pleased how my seedling potatoes that I planted, sprouted and grew so nicely. The tops died off recently and I dug up the potatoes yesterday. It is always fun, like a game to dig and find the potatoes. This harvest of potatoes was from just two plants. I still have many more but this was from the first planting which were ready for harvest. Now I have some nice homegrown potatoes for breakfast to cook tomorrow!

A useful tip: As these are early potatoes, the skins are thin and can not be stored long. You want to use early potatoes right away as they will only store for about a week or so.

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Storing Potatoes

Storing potatoes for long term use is very important. When potatoes go on sale, I like to buy a big bag and use it as needed but many times the potatoes spoil. So I set out to try a new method to successfully store potatoes in my basement.

The method for storing potatoes that I tried was very similar to the one I use for storing my tomatoes over the winter. It involves using newspaper to wrap and cover the produce for long term storage. For the potatoes, I used a plastic laundry basket that I had on hand and newspaper. The step I used are as follows:

First, cover the bottom of the laundry basket with a double sheet of newspaper as shown.

Next, put the potatoes on the newspaper and leave room between them for air flow and so they are not touching each other.

Next cover them with another double layer of newspaper. Continue Reading →

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Baking Potatoes in a Woodstove

I want to share my experience of using a woodstove to bake potatoes. We use a woodstove to heat our home and I wondered about using the woodstove for baking potatoes. It’s already hot and has room inside for baking so why start up the oven for baking potatoes when I could use the woodstove. So I set out to try out my idea, first you want a hot woodstove that has burned down a bit and has hot ashes that you can use as a bed for baking the potatoes.

Next double wrap the potatoes in foil. Move the fire over to one side of the stove as you want to place the potatoes in hot coals and ash but not directly against any burning wood.

Here is a photo showing my two potatoes wrapped in foil and placed inside the woodstove. As you can see, the potatoes are on the ash bed with the burning wood moved over to the side.

After placing the potatoes inside the woodstove, cover up the potatoes with some hot ashes on the side of the firebox as shown in the picture below. I use my small stove shovel to scoop some ashes cover the potatoes to help them bake evenly.

In about 20 minutes, turn potatoes over and cover again with ashes. My large bakers were done after about 45 minutes in the woodstove. Using a potholder, squeeze the taters to make sure they are done and then remove them carefully using a thick potholder or heavy leather gloves as the potatoes are very hot.

The results are some wonderful baked potatoes that are very tasty. This useful idea produces great tasting baked potatoes but also is very useful should you have a power outage. Plus it saves energy by reducing the use of a traditional oven for baking.

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