Digging For Yukon Gold

When you aim for a gold rush but come up with a souvenir nugget.

Now, before you go scrambling to find your pickaxe and gold pan, the elusive nuggets I’ll be talking about here are potatoes.

This year, we tried a new method of growing potatoes. Well, new to us. We had seen multiple places on YouTube and other places where people used this idea with seemingly great results. So, since our family can go through 5 pounds of potatoes in one meal, we decided to give it a go.

Step 1: buy seed potatoes.

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It seemed easy enough. We got Yukon Gold, as those are Tim’s favorite. Not that I have a problem with them, but with living in Idaho as a teenager, I had gotten used to Idaho® Russets and never really branched out much.

Step 2: get a barrel.

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We found what looked to be the perfect barrel. It was sturdy, bright blue plastic, with a wide mouth, a drainage hole, and it could hold 50 gallons. Sounded like a great size for an epic potato harvest.

Step 3: plant seed pieces.

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We cut the potatoes in pieces with healthy eyes on them and buried them waaaay at the bottom of the barrel.

Step 4: wait.

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The waiting was probably easier than it might of been with everything else we had going on this spring, but that didn’t dampen the excitement when we saw the first green shoots sticking up through the dirt.

Now, up to this point, we had done close to everything right. But, unfortunately for us and our potato harvest, there were a lot of things we didn’t know.

• Yukon Golds are determinate potatoes. They only produce one round of potatoes and won’t produce more if you keep hilling them higher.
• Potatoes need lots of drainage to keep the moisture from getting too high and rotting the potatoes. Apparently the one drainage hole wasn’t enough to handle all the rain we got this spring and early summer.
• Potatoes need light fluffy soil and all we have here is clay and more clay.
• Mixing half-composted wood shavings into the dirt to break up the clay isn’t a good idea, as it leaches the nitrogen from the soil.
• There’s probably more that we just don’t realize we don’t know.

To make matters worse, now that it’s all said and done, the potatoes grew beautifully.

This was how they looked when the barrel was about half full. We thought for sure they were doing great.

The flowers came on nicely and we even had several ladybug larvae to keep the aphids off.

They look sad here, but this was not too long before we dumped the barrel. Harvest is supposed to wait until the stems have all died so we were excited to see what they had done.

How much did we harvest, you may ask? One potato. One little round nugget slightly bigger than a golf ball. And a snail shell. Kaitlynn found a perfect snail shell almost as big as the potato. Oh, and one enormous nightcrawler. At least something liked the moisture. 🙂

If only they had the decency to shrivel up right at the beginning, so we could have known something was wrong right off. Instead, they stayed green and healthy-looking the whole time while producing nothing.

But, in all actuality, I think learning the lesson of how not to grow potatoes will stick with us longer this way. So, you win some, you lose some, but what counts is that you learn some and keep going.