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!