kinderGardens Week #19: Potato Harvest

In kinderGardens week #2, I described our plan to grow potatoes in containers.

After a long summer of letting them grow, curiosity got the better of us.  We knew the plants themselves grew really well, but we needed to see the proof.  Would there, indeed, be potatoes?

The kids and I decided that those potatoes should be on the menu for our dinner guests yesterday.

Before we even had the opportunity to dig for potatoes, we found a few really cool creatures!  The first was a wolf spider.  I just learned that there are over 200 species of wolf spider in North America!  Arachnids are amazingly diverse.

The second creature we found was when we dumped the first potato bin.  I have to admit, I was really turned off by the fact that this worm was the same diameter as my finger.  However, he's more than welcome to live in my garden anytime.

My Boy wasn't too eager to dig, but he soon took after his sister, who was pawing through the leaf litter and soil to find her first fingerling potato!

Here, My Boy wants everyone to see that the worm he found in the clod of dirt is almost as big as the small potato he just found!

We emptied 1/2 of the bins; no point in harvesting any more than that at this point.  Overall, it was a small harvest for the amount of space we used.  I have to attribute this to the quality of soil that made it into the bins.  (What will be interesting is that I have a friend who got a set of these free blue bins for her potatoes, and I think she had good soil from her garden to use for planting.  I can't wait to see how her harvest turns out.) 

For the kids, though, this was their moment.  They had so much fun, yelling "Potato!" every time one was poking out of the soil.  Who was I to tell them that we didn't get as many as I had hoped for?  Nothing doing.  This was their time to celebrate what they had grown!

My Boy's (faraway) picture of our harvest yesterday:

This was another great part---a very teachable moment about where food comes from, what it actually looks like when it comes out of the ground, what the difference is between a root and a tuber. 

Thanks for waiting 17 weeks to see the outcome of Project Potato!  Potatoes are one of my very favorite little-to-no-work plants for in the family garden.

Now I just need to set aside the ones I'd like to keep until next spring for my seed potatoes.  Then we can pull out the potato recipes and start enjoying! 

Here's the link to hop over to The Inadvertent Farmer in case you're curious to see what the other kinderGardeners are up to.  Kim's talking today about reflection---where we look back on this year's garden to think about what we'd like to carry over into gardens of the future. 

Thanks for visiting!

-Grace