Confessions of a Clumsy Scot

This year I had so many plans for the garden and honestly most of them fell through, except the potatoes.

I thought I’d give some potatoes a go, I did some research (clearly not enough) and learnt that you can more or less grow them all year round too!

I went to my local garden centre and picked up some grow bags, as I’d previously learnt from our old house mates if you stick them in the ground, you’ll probably never get rid of them, and some seed potatoes. I know one of the were Duke of York seed potatoes but honestly cannot remember the other ones.

My ADHD brain decided then that was it. I threw some compost in the grow bags, and chucked a whole bag of seed potatoes in each and covered them in a layer of compost.

The next few weeks is where I realised I messed up.

I learnt that as they grow you top them up with compost, which was fine and I did that a couple of times over the next few weeks and then came across a video online where someone had put like three seed potatoes in the grow bags for their magnificent harvest. I had obviously over saturated my grow bags with potatoes but then when I went to see if I could at least move some into another container, I was too scared I’d kill them or something like that so I left them.

I decided in July to pull my Duke of Yorks and I honestly couldn’t believe how many potatoes grew in those tiny bags, but in turn it meant I also grew tiny potatoes. So lesson learnt for next year to only put a handful of potatoes in each grow bag, which does mean I can have more containers growing potatoes which means MORE POTATOES!

I pulled the other white potatoes too a couple of weeks ago and they were the same although most were actually bigger than the Duke of Yorks, so maybe had I left them a bit longer they might have gotten bigger. I just assumed as the green was dying off I needed to harvest them!

This is why I started gardening though and growing things. To learn, and learn I did. I cannot wait to have potatoes coming out of my ears next year!