Potatoes From My Garden - In February!

We eat a lot of potatoes here - there are two teenagers in our household- need I say more? I had grown a couple of potato plants here or there as I had room over the years as my vegetable garden overtook the flowers, but as soon as I had space, I planted more. We ate them as "new potatoes" in the summer and then had great fun harvesting them in September (more later about the method I use - no digging and clean harvest - it's great!).



However, I stared at four 5-gallon buckets full of organic potatoes (these days, worth a lot :-) with no idea how I was going to store them. I searched my gardening books and the internet and came up with these options:


1. Cool basement (not in this house)
2. Root Cellar (hey-we live in the West - I don't know anyone with a root cellar!)
3. Bury a plastic trash bin in the ground with the lid at ground level (dig 4 feet down? Uh...I don't think so)
4. Make an above-ground "root cellar" with straw bales and plastic (too complicated, not to mention sounds like an eyesore)
5. Build a cold storage room in your garage (no garage at the time, and build a whole room for a few potatoes?)


Honestly, I couldn't find anything easy or within my abilities. I actually was a little discouraged and started thinking about all the dishes with potatoes in them I was going to have to make over the next few weeks...


Then I read somewhere online about someone putting some potatoes in a cooler (the kind you take camping) for about a month. I thought, well, if they don't last longer, it's still better than nothing. So I found our old cooler out in a shed:


And loaded it with potatoes. In September. It was about 3/4 full that first year. I kept it out in the shed and would go "shopping" for potatoes whenever I needed them. They lasted until the middle of January! The last ones were starting to sprout a little, but they were still good. I've since learned you can choose varieties that store better and I also now use up the varieties first that aren't good storage potatoes.

So today when I when out to get some potatoes for dinner this is what I found:

We have about 1/3 of this cooler yet to go (I filled 1 and 1/2 coolers this year) and they still look pretty good for this time of year. They will probably last another month, getting us all the way from September to March this year - just in time for planting a new batch!

They look pretty good, too, for being stored so long:

Not too many sprouting. The ones on the right are a russet-type and they are sprouting before the Yukon Golds on the left, so we're using them up sooner.

So if you'd like to grow potatoes this year, be looking for my post in March or April (depending on the weather) on my super-easy planting method.

And be on the look-out for old coolers.

Jami