So, this was a little unexpected

I thought I had one big failure in the garden this summer: potatoes. So much so, there are really no pictures. I really didn't expect this.

I tried the 'straw method' for growing them this year, which mean that I placed my seed potatoes in my prepped raised bed full of rich soil, then covered them with a few inches of straw. As the plants got bigger, I added more straw, until there was a foot to 18 inches of straw above where the taters were planted.

At first this looked great! The plants were growing like crazy, looking healthy, and I just kept piling on the straw. Then it stated raining. It never, well almost never, rains in the summer here and then we get these crazy deluges of rain. Here is a con of the straw method-it doesn't really drain water very well and makes is a fungus breading ground. My bed of potatoes became a text book example of late blight and I fought it! It wasn't severe and I kept spraying (organic) fungicides and changing the watering cycle to improve the situation. The plants started looking a little better.

I was going to take pictures of my beautiful late blight when we got back from a weekend out of town, but while we were gone we had a hard frost and it looked there was nothing in my potato bed but soaking wet straw. Great, wonderful, adding insult to injury, thanks frost!

There was a break in the rain today, so it seemed like a good time to see if there were any taters to salvage and too clean out the bed of straw. I brought out a little bucket...then had to go get another bucket.

Wow, 40 pounds of potatoes later, I'm still shocked! I pulled back the first of the straw and there were huge taters staring back at me and then more, and then more. Buy the end, I was a soaking wet, muddy mess (of course it started raining again!), but really didn't care. I just wanted to get inside to weigh my windfall of potatoes!

So in the pile of taters there are Yukon Golds and Purple Vikings (just purple on the outside, white on the inside).


I'm following the Oregon State extension office tips for storing home grown potatoes. I've washed them and now I'm letting them dry before putting them in a small room upstairs where I can control the humidity with my trusty humidifier, that I will greatly miss the next few nights.

I'm almost certain this should be enough potatoes to last us a long while! If dinner wasn't already going on the stove, I'd be making gnocchi right now! I'm not sure if I'm sold on the straw method, but I'm not sure what I'd try next year either! We'll see!