I planted mine laste and they still have not flowered yet and we are starting to get frost warnings.

We had hail 3 times yesterday.

Do the roots develop before or after flowering?

I am so curious to dig them! Like a kid at Christmas, just cannot wait to see what I got!

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I am expecting a lump of coal but then again maybe I was better than I thought!

Oh the anticipation!!!!

Here is a link that might be useful: The Bin again #2 post!

Well, after the debacle of the early variety potatoes (summary, don't grow them in tower bins), I'm focused on my late variety russett bin. It is showing all the right signs of dying slowly and I plan on covering it with plastic to warm it a bit and keep it dry.

It's been flowering for 4 months or more so I hopeful my patience will be rewarded.

Good luck to all with their potatoes!

Here is a link that might be useful: Sinfonian's garden adventure

Well, We dumped our other 3 bins about a week ago, I've been trying to get 5 minutes to upload the photos. Not that the harvest was anything to write home about. : P
Going to try again next year with different variety of spuds. Yukon gold is definately NOT for growing in bins.

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Here's a photo of the "big Harvest" and my "little brat". The 3 piles are in order of what we found in each bin. All of the spuds were in the first tier. Some of them were quite large, and I might add... tasty!

Sinfonian, I'm crossing my fingers for your russets!

PS the shovel She's holding is full of worms... the bins were full of worms... like vermicomposting almost. She likes to feed them to the chickens. What a kid!

Here is a link that might be useful: the rest of my garden photos

Yukon Gold is a really great breed of potato, even if not the best for bins. I harvested my rows the other day. Even with additions of compost and seaweed over the winter yields averaged less than a pound per foot. I need to get more ground into production.

Your "little brat" looks just like the formerly fiendish tow-headed imp we have here.....

oh, don't get me wrong... I LOVE Yukon Gold, just not for binning. Too bad though, I was hoping to get more than 6 meals out of them!
Tow-headed imp, LOL that is a great description, and We have another one in training - 14months old looks just like his sister and is almost the same size. Boy am I in trouble ; )

I didn't do the bins but grew 4 potatoes from the grocery store that sprouted in a trash bag. I didn't pay much attention to them and got enough potatoes for 2 large meals. I would say about 3-4 pounds in all. I would like to try potatoes a little more serious next year.

If you really want yukon golds, plant them in 6 inches of dirt and you'll get decent production. If you want to tower them, or hill them, or tench them, go yellow fin or binjte for the same basic type of potato. Those two are late varieties and will take to hilling or binning. Yukon gold doesn't as an early variety that sets fruit once.

I must say, our yukon golds made great baked potato soup!

Here is a link that might be useful: Sinfonian's garden adventure

Six inches to start is too deep for any variety - it forces the sprout to work unnecessarily hard. 2 to 3 inches at most. So one does need to do some hilling with any type of potato.

We got a killing frost yesterday.

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The potato bin never flowered.

Anyone else have the kill off by frost before flowering?

I will wait a couple of weeks and then dig it up and see what happens.

Anyone else still got their bin on the go?

I've emptied my bins, and I've got a few things to report: I'll admit the harvest was not great. Maybe three times what the young girl above has around her from my biggest bin, and about the same amount she has from the two smaller ones. The potatoes are tasty and high quality, but I certainly didn't get the 100 pounds we were hoping for!

What I did get was some fantastic compost. Instead of soil or planting mix, I've been packing these bins with un-composted yard waste all season, and the worms have had a field day. While I don't have the mountains of potatoes I would have liked, I did find that these bins are a great way to make compost - and that's what they may be next year!

I grew mine in a large black trash bag, and I went to dig them out this past weekend.

Mine never flowered, and the plants died back I'd say back in August - much earlier than I expected (first-time potato grower here). There was a forest of weeds on the top of the bag.

When I cleared the weeds, I found the potatoes still had growth on them, so I hesitated to harvest, but went ahead anyway.

I'd say I got maybe 5 to 7 pounds of potatoes. Not as great as I had hoped, but okay, and kind of exciting since it was my first time.

While I had been worrying the last few weeks because I kept putting off getting out there and harvesting, I actually wonder if I should have waited a bit longer. Some of the potatoes were on the small side, and the still-green growth made me wonder if the smaller spuds would have grown more if I left them a bit longer.

Kind of a lot of work for a small yield, but since I have limited space, I don't see many other options. I think next year I will try the bins instead of bags, and see how that goes. Either way, it was a lot of fun!

:)
Dee

Thankyou, queuetue and diggerdee, for your report. Do you happen to know what variety of potatoes you grew? Or, if it was an early, mid-season, or late variety?

Bob

Bob, I'm not sure what I grew. Actually, I had bought some potatoes from a local organic farmer last fall, and forgot about them! In March or so, I found a paper bag full of sprouting potatoes, so I decided to try to plant them, and that's what I grew. I remember that he grew Kennebec, I think it was, but he also grew some others. I'll ask him next time I see him and see if he remembers what he grew last year.

:)
Dee

Well, I didn't need to search far for a thread to post my results. I know folks have been interested in how my bins turned out. You may recall that my yukons did just as poorly as everyone else's because yukon's are an early variety and set fruit once, period. Waste of a tower.

So, my Butte's. I starved them of water to dry the dirt for two weeks and then I dug them out. I didn't get much in the upper levels, likely because I got lazy and didn't burry the stems fast enough, letting them grow too much. Next year I will be diligent. So, at the end of a long season, I got a whopping 25 pounds out of my 1 pound of late variety seed. Not horrible I'm told, but not the 60 pound average I was expecting. It was good enough to try again though. Next year!

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Here is a link that might be useful: Sinfonian's garden adventure!

Sinfonian,

Compared to the rest of us, 25 pounds is encouraging! You mentioned that there weren't many in the upper level. Do you mean that most of the potatoes were at the bottom or were there also some in levels part way up?

Bob

Ok I dug up the potato bin today...

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Considering that:

1) I did not start this until the end of July,
2) used sprouting potatoes of unknown variety
3) They did not flower but were killed off the 1st frost

I am just happy that I got something out of it. This was more effort than it was worth for these few potatoes but now that the box is built I will give it a try again next year.

REMEMBER IN ORDER TO GET LAYERS OF POTOTOES YOU NEED A LATE VARIETY.

I put step by step pictures of taking the bin apart and what I found at each layer on the progress post where I am tracking my square foot garden ..

Here is a link that might be useful: My Square Foot Garden History, Building ,Pics and Progress PART 4

Sinfo, 25-to-1 return is pretty boss. Of course, the question is, given the same amount of fertilizer and square footage would you have got that kind of return in the ground and hilled? I'd guess yes in your climate. Be interesting to see what a late variety does next year.

A good day to see this thread, since I had hash browns for breakfast and will have baked potato for lunch.......