Winter Gardening! Growing Potatoes Indoors, Part 1

I am utterly fascinated with the concept of four-season gardening. Here in New England, growing stuff in the winter is no easy feat, but I have been hoping to work on extending my garden season, so I’ve been reading up a lot of ways to garden year round. With that goal in mind, last month we began a little experiment… we are currently attempting to grow potatoes inside!  We've always had good luck growing potatoes out in our garden beds, and I did read that potatoes can do very well in containers, so we thought we'd give it a go. Here is what we did:

First, we got ourselves a big 5 gallon bucket, put some rocks in the bottom for drainage, then we tossed in a few shovels of compost. Next we cut some sprouted potatoes in chunks, making sure that each chunk had at least one good eye on it.

We placed these chunks into the bucket, and covered them over with more compost. We water this as we would any other plant, though we are careful not to water it too much, as we don’t want our potatoes to rot.

As the potato sprouts start to grow up through the soil, we keep adding more soil to cover them up. In Potato-Growing Lingo, this is known as "Earthing Up" your potatoes. Now that the soil has reached the top of the bucket, we keep watering, and let the sprouts go. This is where we’re at right now. Once the greens start to die back, we will dig in and see what we have… hopefully, we will have some potatoes!

 I will post updates as this project continues! Meanwhile... the Family and I are beginning to plan out our outdoor garden for the spring! More on this later!

Finding Light in the Darkness

So I haven’t posted in quite a while, as our family has been going through a difficult time. I wondered whether to post about it here, but ultimately have decided that it feels like the right thing to do.

On January 16^th, my children’s father lost a 10-month long battle with pancreatic cancer. The weeks leading up to his death, and the weeks following, have been a struggle for the children, and for us. They weren't able to visit him much this past year, because of his illness, and that, in itself, has been hard on them... they missed a lot of time with him. Because nothing in life is ever simple, we have had a few other difficult struggles in our path during these weeks, as well, which has definitely added to our pain and feelings of being overwhelmed. However… We are Blessed to be surrounded by much Love and support, and that has helped our grief enormously. During this challenging time, I needed to take a break from the blog to focus on caring for my family.

We are trying to ease our way back into a “new normal.”  I know that this will take time. Right now, we are just taking things day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. I know that some days will be easier, some will be harder, and that's OK.