Growing your own food – small scale

Homegrown food is great. In a perfect world everybody would have acres of land to grow their own organic, healthy food. But for city-dwellers like me, that’s just not within reach.

I’m not complaining, though – you can fit a lot of growing things onto a balcony!

And while you won’t be able to grow enough food to squirrel away for the winter, you can at least get a taste of home-grown food :-)

Take potatoes for instance, which Thomas and I just harvested.

We have a terracotta pot we usually use, about 13 inches (33 cm) across, but you can use just about anything as long as it’s big enough. An old bucket, for example.

If you use a bucket, be sure to poke a few drainage holes in the bottom of it. You don’t want to drown your potatoes! Put your planter on a tray to collect run-off water, and put a few bits of wood or stones underneath to raise it enough to let the water out.

After the danger of sub-zero night temperatures have passed – around here that is mid to late April – fill your selected planter about halfway full with soil, put 3 potatoes on top, and add another two-inch (5 cm) layer of soil.

In a week or two, the sprouts will poke their heads up. Add some more loose soil on top of them. The next time they poke through, push soil up from the sides to form a little mound – but not covering the sprouts completely.

After that, add some more soil to the mound every once in a while, making sure your potatoes aren’t exposed to sunlight. Potatoes exposed to sunlight while growing will be a greenish color, and might be slightly poisonous.

Then just sit back and wait, water occasionally – not too much, though. Once every two weeks is usually about right if you get a little rain, too.

As a bonus, your potato plants will actually be very decorative, and if you’re lucky, you will get flowers on them too. We’ve never been that lucky with ours, but at least we get decorative greenery trough the summer, and enough really nice potatoes for a meal. Yay!

You should harvest your potato crop before the temperature at night drops below zero, although one cold night has never done any harm here. We usually scrabble around for the potatoes somewhere around late September/early October.

You can use a small shovel to dig for your potatoes, but we find it’s better to just use our hands – to make sure no potatoes get away ;-) If you want to protect your nails or don’t want to get dirty, you can wear rubber gloves.

Homegrown, fresh potatoes usually taste fantastic. We like to wash and prepare them as soon as we get them inside. There is no need to peel them.

They’re delicious steamed for a few minutes until they are just tender, and eaten with butter or a bit of salt. Drowning the flavor in heavy sauces or stews is a waste of these fresh, tasty potatoes.

Good luck if you decide to try this!

And yum ;-D

{6 comments... read them below or add one }

This post was tagged with: food, homegrown, plants, potatoes

Related posts:

1. How to clean out burnt food without chemicals
2. Baking potatoes: halving time and energy spent