Puny potato harvest

When I harvested the potatoes from the store-bought ones I planted, I got tiny potatoes, from pea size to ping-pong ball size. They were healthy and quite tasty, but not very many and not very big. I thought it was because I didn't use proper seed potatoes.

But today I harvested three of my All Blue potato plants, from seed potatoes I ordered online, and the results are no different. They look like sound, healthy potatoes, but again all I got a handful of tiny ones, pea to ping pong size.

What am I doing wrong here? I planted them on Memorial Day weekend or not long thereafter, so they were in the ground for almost five months. Why aren't I getting much of a harvest?

And I didn't get any zucchini, although I was just starting to get some female blossoms. And the broccoli, although it's still alive, shows no indication of producing any edible broccoli heads.

Where did I screw up? This is really frustrating.

My first vegetable garden was at least as bad as what you describe. I doubt if you did much of anything wrong, except I think you might have done better if you had planted your potatoes quite a bit earlier. Here in Los Alamos, we are supposed to plant them around March 15 th. Potatoes love cold weather. You can begin harvesting little ones when the plant blooms. Sounds like yours never did. They probably weren't mature enough to bloom when it was time for them to bloom. The fact that they were tasty makes it sound like nothing you did was wrong, just you need to do more of it plant earlier, feed more, water more? I am not there and can't say for sure.
The second reason for your problem is probably poor soil. I am sure you put ammendments in, but it is not unusual for gardens to take a year or two or even more to flourish. I am not a soil scientist, but here is what I suspect. Ammendments take a while to break down. My next door neighbor built a magnificent rose garden. She made raised beds and filled them with compost from our dump, good stuff. She planted her roses and one by one they proceeded to die. There were few, if any, that survived the first year. And there were quite a few planted and watered lovingly. The second set of roses grew and flourished and have now survived a couple of years.
I doubt if you filled your garden with compost, but your ammendments, may just need longer to work on your soil. Perhaps you also need more ammendments. I have no clue what you added, but perhaps it is insufficient. You have previously described your soil as moon dust, so I suspect you could add as much as 50% composted organic matter, to make decent soil of your moon dust.
So the answer is, it all lived and seemed to be progressing. To give it the vigor it should have, it probably just needs better soil and possibly more sun. Is your garden shaded? If it doesn't get at least 6 hours of sun per day, it will probably not do much.
I say, keep adding compost purchased or home grown. If there is inadequate sun, move your garden to a sunnier spot. In some of your earlier pictures, I thought I saw Chinese Elms in your yard. If they are close to your garden, move the garden or remove the Chinese elms. The world long ago had its fill of Chinese elms. If they are close to your veggies, they will suck the water and nutrients out of the soil. Plant potatoes early. Also broccoli. Check with your County Extension service for planting dates. Get to know your County Extension office, the government pays for them and they are generally very helpful. They will even come to your house and see what you are doing wrong. For a small fee if you bring them your soil they will test it.
Alas, vegetable gardening isn't like cooking. In cooking you just buy the ingredients and follow the recipe. In gardening, you must nurture the soil which nurtures your plants. Trial and error are the name of the game. One rule that will rarely fail you is ammend, ammend, ammend.
Now is the time to plan for next year.
Betty

I think you're probably right on all counts. Moondust soil and late planting may be the bulk of the problem. I was originally supposed to close on the house in early March and move in by late March, but it was not to be. The garden area gets sun for about 2/3 of the day, then the sun goes over the trees and the garden gets shade and dappled sun except for a time in later afternoon when it shines through some gaps in the trees.

I will amend more when I plant my garlic (tomorrow, hopefully!). The zucchini were just starting to get their game face on when the frost hosed them. Sigh.

One good thing is that, except for the flea beetles and the squirrels, I didn't have very many pests. (Knock on wood!)

Maybe I'll make teeny, tiny french fries and eat with a magnifying glass. LOL!

That is the attitude you need! Sounds like you have enough sun. 2/3 a day is plenty. Early planting for potatoes and broccoli. We all have flea beatles in the Rockies. They are a pain. The way to stop them is with heavy mulch -- like straw. Maybe even a foot of mulch. They live in the soil and a heavy mulch will keep them from jumping onto your plants. But somehow they go away after the middle of the summer. All you have to do is keep your plants alive until the rains start.
Squirrels? I don't know. My problem is gophers, but it is always something. You are growing food! All of nature is thrilled. As time goes on you get better and better at protecting your crops from the critters that would like to have them. It is mostly a bunch of little tricks and endlessly ammending your soil. The more tricks the learn, the more of your harvest you get to eat.
I have learned to get my neighbors to contribute their sacked leaves to my garden. I have found out how to get horse manure and compost from the county. I understand one can get buckets of coffee grounds from Starbucks if you make arrangements with them. I haven't tried that, but lots of people do it.
You do what you can and enjoy the fresh air fresh veggies.
I have to tell you that learning to grow potatoes was hard for me as well. The only thing I knew about potatoes was that I liked them. The first year I got red potatoes and yukon golds but the yellow finns did nothing. It turns out they take the entire season, whereas red potatoes are ready early and yukon golds are ready mid-season or later. But I decided to grow fingerling potatoes, which I had never seen before. They take the entire season and when the season was over I had a ton of them, but they didn't look like potatoes to me and I wasn't sure what to do with them. I ate some, but my husband doesn't like potatoes, so I was sort of limited in how many I could use, so I gave an entire bucket of fingerling potatoes to the owner of one of the nearby horse stalls. I remember the look on his face. His mouth said thanks but his demeanor said -- "These aren't potatoes." I don't know if he ever ate one. He looked very unhappy. I now realize that that bucket probably contained $50 worth of gourmet fingerlings. Sigh. If only I had known.
I have to laugh looking back on it. I have never had such a good crop of fingerlings since and I know understand that they don't have to look like regular potatoes to taste wonderful!
So just hang in there. Each year you will learn more. I started in exactly your situation and now I have nice harvests, but I still fight flea beatles, gophers and the lack of organic matter in my soil. Same as you. If anything will teach you patience, gardening will.



This message was edited Oct 21, 2006 9:16 PM

That was the funny thing about the flea beetles. They swarmed over my broccoli, turning the plants into this writhing mass of black. I sprayed Neem oil, Safer 3 in 1, hot pepper wax, and finally out of desperation, Bug-B-Gone. My attempts might get rid of them for a day, even two, but then they'd be back.

But suddenly, in the middle of the summer, every last one of them was gone. My broccoli survived, barely, but I think it slowed down its progress by a good month. It continued to grow, and it's growing now, but I never got any heads out of it.

Next year, I'll look for a more productive potato. I found a great gardening source for potatoes, Milk Ranch. They have just about every kind of potato there is.

The funny thing is that I read prodigiously on how to store harvest for the winter, especially potatoes, and I doubt if I'll get enough crop to last a week, much less the winter!

Yeah , the first years are frustrating, but you will be surprised by how much better you do next year, I suspect.

Maybe not so puny, after all. Well, the potatoes were, but the harvest was better than I thought it would be.

I harvested the rest of my fifteen All Blue plants today. Out of them all, I got 101 potatoes! That's almost seven potatoes per plant. Now maybe a third to a half of them were pea sized. And only about a dozen or two were "new potato" size. But imagine if they were all real potato size. And there were a lot of little nodes on the roots that would have eventually grown into potatoes had they gotten more time and probably more nutritious soil.

Yeah, definite potential there.

I took some pictures, and I'll try to get some up. And this fall I'll try to work some compost and Miracle-Gro garden soil into the bed. Of course, I won't be planting potatoes in the same spot next year. I bought material for a raised bed, and I've a nice sunny spot to put it in. Good soil, lots of sunshine, long growing season, and a good producer, and--oh, yeah! Potatoes up the wazoo! (Can I say wazoo here? :-) )

On wazoo -- probably okay. We will find out.

I am tickled to hear that the potatoes did better than you thought. I hope you enjoy each little baby potato. Nothing like new potatoes. Yes, start now planning where your new bed will be, enrich it now, then plant them early -- I am guessing mid March in Denver(Aurora). Remember, Colorado is a great potato growing state. People in New Mexico drive to Cortez for truckloads of potatoes. Plant some early potatoes and some mid-season potatoes. Maybe don't start with late ones at this point in your gardening ( and composting) career.

I suspect you will have a bigger and better crop next year. Meanwhile, sounds like you have something lovely to much on.

Here is a picture of my potatoes. They're dark purple, but in the shot they look almost black. I hope this is one of the ones in focus. I'm not a good photographer, and some of the shots are fuzzy.

Try it again. This is the cardboard box I'm going to keep them in, down in the den where it's cooler. I didn't think it would be a good idea to keep them in a plastic bag.

Another one. I'll get this right yet.

The potatoes really looked better in person. It's as difficult to photograph dark purple potatoes as it is to photograph a black cat.

That's Nike, btw. My only girl.

Wow! Beautiful potatoes and even more beautiful cat. I, too, am learning photography thanks to DG. You actually have potatoes for quite a few servings. The home grown are so much better than store bought -- and where do you buy such beautiful blue potatoes anyhow? They aren't often in the store and when they are, they aren't fresh like yours. And I gather you have already learned the difference freshness can make!
You have gone throught the toughest part of gardening. You have begun.
Cheers!
Betty

These are the All Blue potatoes, and I got them from Gurney's online. I had all the pea sized ones tonight. They didn't last longer than about a minute or two. Man, they were good! Milk Ranch also has just about every kind of seed potato you could possibly want.

Nike's half of a pair I adopted from the shelter. I adopted her, but she had a sibling, a brother, and they didn't want to separate them. Piper looks a lot like her, but he's bigger, has a white blaze at his throat, and his eyes aren't quite as round and gold as Nike's are.

I find black cats especially appealing and I like the ones with a white blaze best. Are the two cats especially close? I have two Keeshonds ( dogs) which are brother and sister from the same litter. They lived a good bit of their lives seperately, but at age 13, they are incredibly close. The female really get's upset if she is seperated from the male. She tries to keep him from coming in the house -- she prefers the outdoors. He has to bulldoze his way past her when he wants to come in. Luckily for him, he is much larger than she.