Woohoo! Our potatoes have crested the soil and we’re on our way to a bountiful harvest!
Potatoes were one of those crops that we avoided growing in our early gardening practice. They are super cheap to buy at the grocer, so why put our valuable efforts into growing such an invaluable crop? Well, we’ll tell you…they really grew on us! (Har, har!) Today, they’re on our essential growing list.
Potatoes have an advantage that most other garden veggies don’t have. They require very little input. From the seeds, the initial planting effort and to seasonal nutrition, there’s really very little you have to do with them. Sure, they’ll benefit from a single fertilization or two over the season, but compared to a lot of our crops, they are almost effortless. You can even completely ignore them entirely and you’ll still get potatoes.
But, what really did it for us was that first harvest. We had no idea how fun harvesting potatoes was going to be! It’s like hunting for little gold nuggets in the dirt, providing hours of entertainment that makes us feel like kids again. If we were digging in the dirt like we do when we were children, we’d definitely be in trouble! We’ve even harvested in the literal mud and it’s still a good time!
Then, there’s the fact that potatoes are practically a perpetual crop. Once you buy seed potatoes, you can eat all you possibly can and still have enough for seed potatoes the next year! As extreme northern growers, that’s a difficult cycle to achieve since most of our plants often don’t have time to fully mature their seeds. Sure, once a decade you might experience some catastrophic thing like we did last year and have to replace your seed stock. But, we’ll tell you, we are way ahead on our potato funds!
I don’t know if you’ve bought a potato recently, but these days the economic scale has heavily shifted towards growing your own! We paid a buck and a half for ONE potato recently! So, that means we’ll probably be pulling what? Like $500 worth of potatoes out of the ground this fall? Growing potatoes is like having your own money printer! That’s hard for even me to believe when it comes to potatoes, but I guess these are the times we are living in!
We’ve done a full 180 degree turn on a lot of different crops over the years. In both directions! There’s things we thought we’d always grow and no longer do. And then there’s crops like the potato that simply won us over, becoming one of our all time favorites of the garden. We never thought we’d be such fans of the boring old potato!
So, if you’re like we used to be and get all judgy about growing those “low value” crops, we’d encourage you to give it a shot. You can always decide not to grow them again. But, on a fun scale, potatoes rank #1 in our garden!
