One of the hardest things about doing something new is understanding what is realistically possible.
Take, for instance, growing potatoes. If I were to hand you a potato and suggest that you grow it how would you know what to expect?
Potato Expert?
Now, if you happen to be a potato growing expert, please do skip down and leave me some great tips. If not, read on.
Of course it needn’t be potato growing you’re new to, it could equally well be tomatoes, green beans, cabbage, butterfly milkwort, oak trees, or hedgehogs.
No Gardener is an Island
I’m sure you get the point. We could all talk until the cows come home about growing wonderful potatoes, but, when it comes right down to it, none of us operates successfully in an experience vacuum. We all like need someone to learn from, or at the least to learn with, and an example of what is possible.
Conducting our own gardening experiments is a certain amount of fun, but it gets ‘old’ right about the time of crop failure. Fortunately most of us are not dependent on the harvest to feed our families. I’m thankful for that at least (you’ll see why in a moment).
2010 Potato Harvest
This beautiful line of potatoes is my 2010 potato harvest. Don’t they look nice?
But wait a minute, those six potatoes are the harvest from one 5 gallon bucket which I spent considerable time nurturing.
Their combined weight is an impressive unimpressive 13 ounces. Which, if I’m lucky, is about 3 times the weight of the original potato which I planted.
Laughable Potatoes
Needless to say, on the day I harvested these potatoes, I was the butt of quite a few jokes at the family dinner table. My son even told me that if we wanted to eat potatoes every day for dinner I’d need 365 buckets next year, which totally put it in perspective.
But the harvest from this single bucket is actually an improvement on the results I got last time I tried my hand at potato growing. Yay, at least I’m going in the right direction!
Learn From My Mistake
So, learn from my mistake. The trouble was, until I dug up those potatoes, I had no clue what I was going to get. I don’t know anyone in my community who grows potatoes and I wasn’t seeing what a really healthy potato plant looks like.
We all benefit from working with others – kids especially learn a lot from other adults in your community. Try it, it’s amazing! Don’t try to operate your gardening in an experience vacuum. As well as reading about gardening, try to connect with neighbors. Share your photos and videos online too. It’s more fun that way.
I think I’m going to have to start a gardening community. What are you growing? What do you think about connecting online and offline?
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I love your honesty! Our little garden was a learning experience, too & we had our fair share of laughs. No carrots sprouted & only two radishes came up. On the other hand, our two tomato plants produced more than in past years & our (potted) sunflowers were beautiful. Looks like a few of us school parents are thinking of starting a gardening club, too, which I very much look forward to!
Debi, that’s too bad that your carrot seeds didn’t even germinate. What a great science lesson! Now radishes I seem to do well with. And tomatoes I’ve had success with, though I didn’t end up getting any planted this year.
Do keep me updated with your gardening club experience – I was just thinking of writing a post about how to start a gardening club, where I’d interview people who’ve done just that. I’m going to put that on my calendar.
And I have a post planned for the end of this week (Thursday or Friday) on growing a back to school garden – about what you can plant in summer.
We’re chalking up all of our garden experiences to lessons learned – the kids take any “failures” with a simple “oh well,” which certainly keeps things in perspective!
I’ll definitely keep you posted about our garden club. It’s just an idea at the moment, but hopefully it’ll happen. The most exciting part is that we’re hoping to use our school garden as a meeting place. How perfect!
I think my problem is that going with mostly native plants is so EASY compared to vegetables that I get a completely misplaced confidence. I barely water! I barely fertilize! The plants grow! Clearly gardening is easy! My thumb MUST be green!
Then I get out into the vegetables, which are starving from lack of water and have gone weird and leggy and have things on them and are overrun with weeds and occasionally outright dead and I realize that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing and am clearly not very good at it.
I find your potatoes impressive! I don’t even know where my onions went, and I’ve never tried potatoes at all…
UrsulaV´s last blog ..Teeny Tiny Anole
UrsulaV, you’re a walking advert for native plant gardening! It’s true though, native plants really are the best, and easiest, thing to grow. I’ve been meaning to try Jerusalem Artichokes – a native with beautiful yellow sunflower like flowers, which is shade tolerant, and has edible roots. It could be perfect for my garden.
Regarding potatoes, I decided to harvest bucket #2 today – this one had a bit longer to get all that goodness down into the roots and form potatoes. It had a “whopping” 18oz of potatoes. It’s still only about 3x what I put in, which is a low yield – I was hoping for 8x. But, again, it’s the right direction.
And while I’m confessing, the potatoes I threw into a neglected patch of bare soil in my garden (the ones actually pictured at the top here) yielded 3 quarter size potatoes per plant. I used more calories digging them up than I got from eating them!
Hey, if you used more calories digging than you got from eating them, then technically they’re a diet food!
UrsulaV´s last blog ..Teeny Tiny Anole
Thanks for making me LOL. Yes, they’d be a starvation diet!
I am currently growing potatoes in barrels in my garden and have no idea what to expect when I pour them out. I’m almost afraid to, really. I live around quite a few gardeners, but most of us are in the same boat: in our first year or two of gardening. There are really not too many experienced gardeners around us either.
Are those six potatoes the best that you ever tasted? Can you taste the love and nurturance?
This is my first year gardening and there are about a hundred things (literally) I will do differently next year. I share my gardening experiences every Tuesday on my blog, and would love to connect with more people doing the same.
I just find it so nourishing to grow food though, as it is such a wonderful journey, packed with many life lessons, if you care to read the metaphors.
Meme´s last blog ..Tending Tuesdays- What’s happened to my garden
Meme, now you’re going to have to come back and share about your potatoes once you’ve harvested them! Or, better yet, you could write a guest post for Loving Nature’s Garden sharing the best things you’ve learned and what you will do differently next year. And, you never know, you might turn out to be the potato expert among us – go to the harvest with great hope.
In answer to your question, sadly, I can’t say they were the best potatoes I’ve ever tasted. I was totally spoiled by great Scottish Ayrshire potatoes when I was a kid – no doubt they were grown organically back then too. And I’ve had some pretty nice Kansas potatoes from a local, organic farm. Just to make it really hard to find fabulous potatoes to match my memory, my taste buds are not what they used to be. Still, I’m not intending to give up (I can be stubborn like that)!
Your son cracks me up–365 buckets–what a hoot. I can just picture those all over the yard.
Seriously, though, impressed that you gave it a go and are determined to try it again.
Meg´s last blog ..Minimalism and How It’s Shaping My Life
Now I’m tempted to give my son a homeschooling geometry exercise in calculating how much space 365 buckets would need
I’m glad you liked the story Meg. Your comment made me smile
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