Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

This season we have finished growing potatoes in the dirt garden like usual, then harvested out of buckets, now I'm getting the bags started. Trying to stagger out the potato harvest.
We eat a lot of potatoes.

Yowzer, there are some sprouts on those seed potatoes.

LOL, yeah, that project has been on the TO DO list for too long. Trying to catch up.

How economical is buying the starter potatos?

Bought about 15 in a small paper bag from a Tractor Supply store in town. If each of your seed potatoes yield 8-15 potatoes, I'd say that's very economical.

A small 5 pound seed potato bag cost $6, but you can get them cheaper in bulk from regular feed/agriculture stores. Mine was a spurious purchase, then life took it's usual left turn and the bag sat on the shelf for months. Hence the large sprouts!

The harvest from two of these 5 pound bags in the dirt garden was about 3 five gallon buckets worth. Almost done eating them already. Went too long between harvest and replant. Next year we will try to do better.

The harvest from growing in the 5 gallon buckets was about 8-10 or so, but I was using real good compost dirt so that may vary depending on your own dirt, how many times you water them, etc...

Sometime in the future, I'd like to try to use the wicking tubs, watering with AP water. And rain water of course.

Can u just use normal potatoes from the supermarket?

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You can but they are not certified disease free. Probably okay for the backyard grower. Check out the backyard farming thread a few pages back. It is discussed there

I was watching river cottage tonight
He said if you want bigger potatoes remove some of the eyes and if you want lots of young new potatoes leave them all on.

Some of them have been treated with an anti-sprouting spray. If you look close, you'll see that some of the taters may have a tinge of green. This is because the tractor turns the earth and lays the potatoes out on the ground for harvest leaving them in the sun. They spray to keep them from sprouting until they can all be gathered for sale.

Or some of the more advanced mechanical means is to dig and run them up a chute to a trailer. This knocks the dirt off and is also cheaper than hiring field workers. I'm sure there are many other ways of harvesting, but these are the ones I know about.

Try not to buy the green tinged potatoes at all. The green stuff is actually a bit toxic. If you can get organic potatoes and put them in a paper bag in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator for a couple of months, they should sprout just fine. The loose potatoes in the store are better than the ones bought in the plastic bags. Then you can pick and choose which ones you want.

Have a few sweet potato sprouts (Beauregard) in a wicking tub. We'll see how they go.

These were from leftover potatoes from last years harvest. Just left them on the shelf at home. A bit too soft to eat, but they had sprouts growing. Snapped off the sprouts, put them in a small jelly jar with a bit of water. When they started shooting out roots, they went into the dirt garden. Have gathered 8 sprouts so far off of one potato. And it's still shooting off sprouts.

Think I'll give the bag method a try to see how that works.

This is a cool thread.

The Beauregard is a sweet potato not a yam. Will have to Google yams to see what they actually are.

I just used the ones I got from the grocery store and let them sprout because I did not use them fast enough. Just keep them in the dark. I do not buy the green ones either. I don't cut of the sprouts at all, I just cover them up with the sprouts up and water em good.

I stared with seed potatoes which I planted whole and now I just plant which ever ones start to sprout before I have chance to eat them.

Once harvested it is a good idea to leave them laying in the sun for a few hours as it helps to harden the skin which means the will keep longer, a few hours in the sun should not make them turn green so long as they are stored out of the light there after.

On storage, I keep mine on a cool concrete floor in a dry part of my shed in half blue barrels with drainage holes in the bottom and I cover them with dry soil to keep out light. I found they would last about 5 months like this over summer and autumn before the start to sprout. I have also heard breathable hessian sacks in the bottom of the pantry works well.

Has any one else had good success storing spuds?

Hessian sacks must be an aussie term, here we call them potatoe sacks or burlap bags.

Yep, same thing

$3-$4 kg for spuds in supermarket. $8 for 1kg of sees potatoes from bunnings. They recon you can get 8-10 times the yield from minimal effort. So that's 8-10kg of potatoes for $8 as opposed to 2kg.

Those first lot input in in this post were from supermarket so only a few cents worth of potatoes.