Almost two dozen light brown-skinned potatoes covered with a small amounts of dirt lay in a single layer in a brown cardboard box.

What fun to harvest my first ever potatoes from my garden! I know it doesn’t look like a lot of potatoes, but they were fun to grow.

And I learned a lot about growing potatoes:

when to water
how to hill
what to do when the plants flower
how to know when to harvest (they grow under the soil)

I’ve never grown potatoes before, since I understood they needed a fair amount of space. I have a relatively small vegetable garden, outside of cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and peppers I plant in grow bags.

But this year I discovered several gardening colleagues had successfully grown potatoes in grow bags. So I had to give it a try.

My First-Ever Homegrown Potatoes

Growing potatoes wasn’t as easy as growing peppers from seed. First I had to get seed potatoes (only found at some plant nurseries), chit them, and plant them.

My first attempt didn’t go well.

I bought Red Norland, an early-season potato, from a local family-owned plant nursery.

Learned about chitting potatoes (which means to cut the potatoes up into smaller pieces, each with an “eye”) and put my chitted potatoes in an egg carton in a sunny place.

Chitting potatoes is supposed to give your potato plants a head start. Stronger plants, quicker to produce a potato.

Except my chitted potatoes didn’t sprout.

I was disappointed.

But that didn’t stop me. I bought some Kennebec seed potatoes, a mid- to late-season potato. Cut them up into smaller pieces with an eye, and planted them.

Without chitting.

It was getting late in the spring planting season in our southeastern Michigan area (late May), and I didn’t want to wait any longer.

The photo in this post shows my results. I was pretty happy, given I used two small grow bags (five-gallon and seven-gallon).

We ate the potatoes with dinner last week. They were delicious!

Mind you, they were not very different in taste from potatoes I buy at our local grocery store.

Except I grew them!

And my homegrown potatoes seemed firmer and held their shape after cooking.

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Photo of the Week: My First Potatoes!