Sometimes my inner voice says I’m too preachy about things. It is true that I share a lot more success stories than mistakes. So far, our potato growing has been nothing but missteps and I’m ready to share so we all can learn from them. Here are all the ways I do NOT recommend you grow potatoes. 1) Give potato buckets only a little drainage. Last year we tried growing some seed potatoes in old [...]

We weren’t in a gym, but Alex, Lil and I exercised our bodies this weekend!  We were outside almost all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  We’re exhausted and exhilarated.  Here’s what happened: The deck was torn down.  Lucky for us, the builders were poor at concrete setting and posts came out fairly easily.  They also used subpar techniques for covering the crawl space and we got to replace wood on the sides of the house; [...]

The premise: Plant 1 pound of seed potatos in a potato tower (described below) and nearly a hundred pounds of potatos will fall at your feet at harvest time.  The premise is that each time you load up the tower with more soil, potatos send out more baby tubers that then grow into full size potatos. The experience: We planted a potato tower in mid summer 2009 with two pounds of mixed seed potatos gifted [...]