Container Potato Harvest

We didn't want the potatoes to freeze, so we moved the containers in the garage and insulated them with hay and straw bales until we could get to harvesting them. 

It worked pretty well! Some of the plants started growing again...

The dirt stayed soft and for ease of harvesting we dumped the containers on the garage floor. 

It was a simple matter to pick the potatoes out of the pile. The one tricky part was the layer of gravel I put in the bottom of the containers... Was that for drainage? Weight so they didn't blow over? Regardless, the small rocks looked surprisingly like little potatoes and harvesting didn't go as quickly as it could have. 😅 

I was disappointed in the quantity of potatoes we grew. I expected the bins to be full of good sized potatoes. We did get some good sized tubers, but there weren't the bushels I expected. 

Red potatoes were the worst producing. The sun bleached my identification tags and we mixed up the order of the bins, so I don't know how the other varieties grew. 😬 

Well, the sweet potatoes were easy to identify. They grew long and scraggly (the right side of the bucket). 

The last step in harvesting potatoes was setting them out to dry/harden their skin. I laid them out in the laundry room on a screen held up by a crate to allow the air to flow in all directions. 

The sweet potatoes too... Don't they look strange??

If I did the sweet potatoes over again, I would definitely fill the pot with dirt right from the beginning to give them more room to grow. 

I wonder why the harvest was small... Maybe it was a decent amount given the number I planted. This was my first time growing potatoes, so I'm not sure how many per plant is normal. 

The potatoes stayed in the bins a long time after the green plant died before I harvested them. Could some have rotted from the rain? Possibly. 

I found a few soft/half rotted potatoes as I dug around. Those could've been a result of freezing (the bottoms of the tubs weren't insulated and were sitting directly on the garage floor). Maybe more rotted from rain or freezing. 

It could also be a nutrition issue. The regular potatoes probably needed more fertilizer than I gave them. I kind of left them to their own devices this summer. 

I remember needing a lot of dirt to mound them the few times I did (because they had grown so tall in between moundings). I wonder if I checked them more frequently and added dirt gradually, they would've produced better. 

Will I plant potatoes in containers again? Yes, the harvesting method was too easy not to do it. I'll definitely do more research over winter on container potato tips!