Thursday, October 27, 2011

Potato - Fail


What you are looking at is our entire potato harvest for the year!  Yep, pretty much a failure of our potato experiment this year.

The wire bins that we filled with soil, compost, and straw as the potatoes grew, proved irresistible to the many burrowing moles, voles, ground squirrels and such that we have in multitudes here.  The hypothesis was that the loose enriched soil would make it easy for potatoes to grow and people to dig.  We'll never know for sure, because it made it even easier for these creatures to weasel through for their 24 hour buffet.  I'm surprised that they missed this one!

Considering that we harvested fewer potatoes than we planted the summer before leads us to the conclusion that we'll be buying our spuds at the grocery store from now on!

But our tomato crop more than made up for it.  We also lost all 3 baby Aspen trees to deer, and they found our 2 fruit trees very tasty.  I'm hoping they'll recover and that we can find a better way to protect them next summer.  We haven't gotten a single fruit from these either, in their 2nd year, so those too may be a failed experiment, but our raspberries and blueberries have already shown promise and produce!

I've spent a great deal of time in our beautiful fall weather doing my least favorite chore... pulling up dead plants, cleaning up and putting the garden to bed for the winter.  It's time now for some serious sewing!!

3 comments:

The Thompsons said...

That's funny- the same exact thing happened to us. I for 4 tiny, tiny potatoes, and then had tomatoes coming out the ears. My husband has begged me not to plant as many tomato plants next year. :)

Beth@IHaveANotion.com said...

hmmmmmm. Maybe a potato box... either raised or slightly sunken. Everything else in raising potatoes is the same... on the other side of distastful task... is much more indoor time, (translates to quilting time)!

Shanna of Fiber of All Sorts said...

Well we had the same issues. . my garden wasn't successful as even your tomatoes! But we have a plan for next year. Hopefully you can research something for next year with these potatoes.