Spontaneous potatoes

[angharad_gam]

 One thing about growing potatoes is that you will pretty much always be growing potatoes thereafter. A potato plant can grow out of a tiny piece of potatio (all you need is an 'eye'), and when you dig up the potatoes it's easy to miss the really tiny ones, which will promptly grow into new potatoes. But in something different, we now have potatoes spouting in one of the back vegetable plots where I am pretty sure I have never planted potatoes. Certainly I didn't plant them last year, because I had radishes growing in that bed. It's possible I planted them more than a year ago, and they have been lurking in the ground ever since, waiting for their chance. This was the same bed where lettuces grew three years in a row out of seed sown only once - perhaps there is something especially peculiar about that particular bed. Or perhaps I just forgot. 

I have been fairly busy in the garden lately, after a long period of idleness enforced by the cold that didn't want to go away. The front garden is mostly weeded, and there are bulbs coming up all over the place. This morning I planted herbs and vegies in the courtyard and out the back. I did actually plant some peas in the courtyard a few weeks ago, but the rat ate all the seedlings. 

It was a noisy business. There is a tree along our back fence that has been claimed by noisy miners. When another bird sits in the tree about five or six of them show up and scream at it constantly to go away. Today the bird was a piping shrike, and it was giving back as good as it was getting in terms of noise. I think it must be mating season - there was another (or maybe the same) piping shrike outside our front door this morning loudly proclaiming that this was their spot, and here they were. 

Comments

[dirtygreatknife]

Maybe I should try potatoes in one of the big pots. But I'm not sure how they'd do, and I think I'd also forget they were in the pot and put something in the pot with them.

You should hear the birds in the bottlebrush tree in springtime--the crows, native blackbirds, miners and rosellas are all shouted at LOUDLY by the army of honeyeaters. I have since learned that when honeyeaters are like that, it's called a corroboree. I'd previously called it akin to a drunken wedding reception.

[angharad_gam]

They'd probably be okay, so long as the soil is not too compacted. You can also build up soil or mulch around the stem as they grow, which encourages more spuds without needing really deep soil. You can grow potatoes over winter (they like it cold and damp) when lots of other things won't grow - I don't know if that would reduce the chance of accidental double planting. In theory you can plant any potato (or cut one up - you just need a piece with an eye) but it's recommended to only use proper seed potatoes as they are generally disease free (and if you get a disease in your soil it is very difficult to get rid of).

We get rosellas in the front garden when the trees there are fruiting, and the odd honeyeater too, but they mostly seem to get on. Our old house was near a creek and the cockatoos and galahs going to roost there in the evenings could be pretty deafening.

[dirtygreatknife]

Huh. I did not know any of this. I might try it for next year. I still haven't been able to plant out the bulbs, my back is *killing* me, bending over is a nightmare. (Watch me grunt and groan though, when I find a ton of paper on the ground at the craft fair!)