First Harvest

Some mysterious Facebook algorithm had the same post appear in both our feeds, an Easy Slow-Cooker Lemon Chicken . As it turned out, Linda ...

Some mysterious Facebook algorithm had the same post appear in both our feeds, an Easy Slow-Cooker Lemon Chicken. As it turned out, Linda and I both bookmarked the recipe.

Picture from the recipe online

Linda said she was headed to the store for the ingredients, and I said, "Wait, I have the potatoes!" Actually I wasn't sure if I had the potatoes, but I knew I was growing them.

Back in February I purchased potato fabric grow bags from GrowSun on Amazon. I found the seed potatoes at HomeDepot.

Planting in early February

One of the selling points of the GrowSun bags is a side panel that opens and lets you harvest the potatoes throughout the season.

Potato vines

Potatoes were first cultivated in South America, and became an export to the old world. It literally was the "viral" vegetable of its time and spread so quickly that later scholars incorrectly determined that the potato must have been cultivated in other locations around the world prior to the Spanish and Portuguese explorations.

Potato harvest in Nepal, May 2015

Today, there are currently thousands of varieties of potatoes, but recent DNA findings show a single location (the Andes) for what we call the potato. Like the number of varieties, there are many ways to cook the potato, like a curry in India, shepherd's pie in the UK, the ubiquitous fries, and the recipe above.

Potatoes are easy to grow. As seen in the movie "The Martian", plant a "seed potato" in the ground and as the plant grows, new potatoes grow on the roots. The "seed potato" is not really a seed, but a miniature of a grown potato. It is asexual reproduction, as the offspring are duplicates of the seed potato. If you have time, you could let your potato plants flower and go to seed, and then plant those seeds. However the results, may not look like the potato you were expecting. Then again, you may invent a new variety of potato!

The potato bag had a "side-door" that we could have used to extract individual potatoes, but I wanted to see what was in the whole bag after three months.



I cut the vines. Now at this point if I had planted this in a garden, I would have reached for the shovel, but since I was using a fabric bag, I just dumped the soil into a large plastic container and sorted out the potatoes.

There was a lot of "wow, look at that!"

Four and half pounds of potatoes from a single bag! Not included were the small potatoes I put back in the bag with soil for the next crop this season.

Yukon Gold Potatoes

We used the potatoes in the slow cooker for the Lemon Chicken and had enough left over for potato salad. If I were to adjust the recipe, I would have nixed the asparagus, added the finished slow cooker results to a cast iron pan, and baked in the oven for 15 minutes. Crisping up both the chicken and potatoes would have made it taste less like hospital food.