Pet Potato Project Part ???

I've been horrendously sick with back to back Martian flu bugs the last few weeks, so I haven't been able to do as much around the house as I had wanted. After being laid up for a week and a half I couldn't take it anymore!!! I absolutely HAD to get one of my outdoor projects done, fever and leaking nose or not! Thankfully my fever, my Girlchild and the unrelenting heat and humidity cooperated. 
I had been taking pictures of the potato vine to keep track of how much it had grown. About 3-4 weeks ago it was only an inch above the dirt. Then suddenly.... ZIIIPPP!! It was a LOT, LOT more.
This thing has been transplanted more than an Army brat, so I was hoping to make this the last time this summer I touched it, letting it grow until it was harvested later on.
We bought a pot at Target that was sufficiently attractive but also heavy duty plastic so I wouldn't have to worry about it potentially shattering in the winter cold the way a clay pot might, and also probably shelled out $80 less. Seen here, you can see the difference in height. It was also wider by several inches, allowing for outward root expansion and tuber room.

And you can see what a monster the potato vine turned in to.

I had initially been thinking my way through several scenarios where I planted the vine and it couldn't get sunlight, so was envisioning setting it up at an angle to catch sunlight, starting the potato on top of Styrofoam that I dug out slowly from the bottom to lower it in.... but that really wasn't a problem by the time I compared the two.

Yeah. It's almost to the top already.

It'll be able to get sunshine juuuuuust fine. It's about an inch below the rim of the pot already, which now has me concerned it'll run out of room almost immediately.
The Dirt Princess was on hand to make sure that the soil was properly aerated, stealing dirt from the "master pot" I had filled to put around the potato vine once it was in the pot.

Don't mind me, Momma, I'm over here being adorbz.

So the first problem to address was the complete lack of drainage in the pot. The sheer amount of rain and humidity had already killed off my basil plants in a pot that HAD drainage and several of my herb seedlings, so keeping it from being waterlogged was a priority.

 Easily dealt with, we have a very handy drill set. I chose the 1/4 drill bit. The worst part of it was apparently the noise, but once I showed the Dirt Princess what I was doing, she was fascinated, watching the annoying little curls of plastic rise up out of the base and snap off. The entire thing was done in 2 minutes, tops.

Behold, the wonder I have wrought with power tools.

Now, had this been pottery I would've tried the same thing but using water and at a muuuuuuuch slower speed. I've heard people say "Use a masonry bit". Well... I don't have one of those, but I HAVE drilled excruciatingly slowly through a glazed pot with only a few small flakes around the hole to show for it. So I know it can be done. Just a handy tip. And don't press down too hard or you'll crack it in half. Just generally BE DELICATE WITH THE THING!
At that point we got rid of the drill and its accompanying bag o' bits before it could become a potting soil receptacle, the fate of any open receptacle on the porch when my precocious daughter decides to spread it around and share with the plants. Or the citronella candles.
I followed up with an extra two or three inches of soil at the base, oh-so-carefully tipped the plant out of its previous post, and set it in the bottom. It was shored up at the side with more potting soil, then I began the complete guesswork of filling the dirt in around the potato vine, using it to hold up and separate the now two arms of it and give them space to grow outward.

Dirt Princess shown here working on her own private and intensive project with wiry potato vine next door.

The problem is, most tutorials online assume you haven't waited while your vine bolted and you've been diligent covering it every two inches or so. AKA - you know what the hell you're doing and you're properly prepared. HAH. I managed to find one article that said once you had seven inches, bury it and keep on top of things until it reached the top of your container courtesy of Gardening Know How, Article found (here). All other references to potato vines involved sweet potatoes. Those are another devil I want to tackle, once I get a potato that creates slips and doesn't just rot instead.
It took several trips to get soil in the pot I could carry up and down the deck stairs (I will not miss those deck stairs, seriously) but eventually we had a mostly potted potato vine, looking pretty dandy.

Shown for scale on its side, the large blue pot I filled with potting soil three times to go around the potato plant.

I'm glad to get this off of my checklist of things, as we are moving on the 7th and I need everything to be transplanted by then so the plants can be moved in to their mostly permanent summer/fall homes at our new place.
I moved it in to its location where it'll get morning and early afternoon sun without an issue, and I know I have a spot at our next place that will allow for the same. And because I had been so gently placing soil in around the plant, the Dirt Princess promptly volunteered with her own soil she had been diligently spreading around and aerating, adding the last inch to the top of the soil. It was really neat to have her helping!

Look at my cool little helper!

Am I doing this wrong? Probably. But the guides I read online are very hazy about exactly what happens with the vine when you put it in dirt so I don't know for sure if it's going to be a glorious success or it's going to rot and die horribly in the next few weeks. But given how much it's fought through to get to where it is now and how gentle we were about transplanting it this time, I think in the very least I may get a next generation potato to use for next year. Barring that, I have experience and this will be more fun to try again later.
I did see a video where a man just placed wire mesh around the potato plant and literally dumped a bucket of dirt over top of it without preamble or care, explaining that it would grow up through all of that and continue to do so with each successive bucket. That has me thinking that I may be treating it TOO delicately, if anything. If this thing starts to go monster on me again, I may add a mesh cage and more dirt to get a few more inches and a few more potatoes out of it. I just have this crazy dream of making a potato dynasty out of something my daughter swiped from the grocery store, you know?? I'm looking forward to seeing potato blossoms for the first time in my life come August/September.
It felt good to be outside, although it left me very winded and dizzy after all of the carrying and hefting. An incoming cloudburst was the only thing that sent us inside afterward, otherwise I would be trying to transplant the pumpkins and watermelon seedlings that are already getting leggy on me.
There's just something about getting my hands in soil and helping living things get larger that makes me happy and content, and I needed that in the midst of growing pregnancy pains and battling illness. If I'm feeling better tomorrow, I may use the very last of my potting soil to transplant a few things and move some teddy-bear sunflowers to a more permanent home.

Evie's Pet Potato

So a lot of my friends know this story, but random internet folks do not.
Let me preface this by saying that when the dirt princess and I go to the grocery story, she WANTS TO HELP. Big time. And when she WANTS TO HELP, that can be satisfied usually by handing her whatever I've picked off the shelf to put in the cart. She holds on to it until I find the next object, at which point she usually lays the current object aside or helpfully turns and drops it in to the cart behind her. And she does this while charming the boogers out of everybody who works there and some of the shoppers.
The only exception is when I hand her unpackaged produce. This started as an attempt to show her what different things were that we were going to eat. I would hold up a tomato and say "This is a tomato!" and she would happily grab at it and hold it until I held up the bag with several more tomatoes in it, at which time she dropped it in among the others of its kind.
Sometimes this backfires, though. See, my kid is curious and loves to learn and she's still at the stage where things go in the mouth. Parents are familiar with this across the board, so I won't explain.
Earlier this year, winter I believe, I was picking potatoes up for reasons I can't remember. I held up a big ol' Idaho baking potato and told my daughter "This is a potato!" Forgetting at that moment that I also referred to hash browns and french fries as "potatoes" so she would understand what she was about to eat.
By the time I had turned back to her with a bag filled with more potatoes, she had scraped a half inch gap in to the top of the one I had given her, was making a face, and clenching the potato closely to her. When I attempted to get her to put it in the bag, for some reason that time she refused, holding it close to her chest.
I jokingly asked "Is that your pet potato?" to which she nodded, as she does almost any time I ask her a question. And onward we went through the grocery store, my child clutching this potato for dear life.
I couldn't put it back because the kid had obviously drooled all over it and torn it up, so I was resigned to taking it home and making something out of it. It got all the way to checkout with my daughter holding it before she grumpily let it go to be weighed and rung up.
I set the potato aside and almost forgot about it until one day I remembered I had NOT used that one with the others in the dish I'd made (the top turned gnarly colors and I was concerned about cooking it for someone) and that it was still in my kitchen somewhere. I sought it out, found it nestled behind some bananas on our toaster (I don't know... it must've seemed like a good resting spot) and realized with surprise that the thing had green sprouts coming out of it!
I have big plans for my dream garden, and one of those is having a potato "tower" to grow my own potatoes in. When I saw those sprouts, I realized I could start growing the potatoes right now, just keep it in a pot and size up as necessary until I had the proper space for it. With great excitement I sectioned it out so each part had two "eyes" sprouting, and buried it in a mixture of potting soil and coffee grounds.
Don't do that. It's horrible, retains moisture, and I ended up losing three of the four sections to rot. At that time the 4 sections of 6 that had survived being in a dish with standing water went on to be transplanted to an apothecary jar. I thought it might be cool to see the roots grow in it. I labeled it in case people would be coming in to see the house, as I still had pipe dreams of getting the place on the market back in January/February. It just seemed important that people know WHY I had an apothecary jar full of dirt chilling on my pie cooling rach-cum-plant stand.

I promptly left it to its own devices, thinking that it would go slowly due to the lack of sunlight and heat until I opened it one day and OMG WHAT IS THIS THING??

I had apparently grown a miniature Elder God. Which was cool, don't get me wrong. But it just looked.... wrong. And I'd read that exposed roots and tubers could turn poisonous so I quick-like-a-bunny got some more potting soil and coffee grounds in there (see? I kept making the SAME MISTAKE. DON'T USE POTTING SOIL AND COFFEE GROUNDS, IT DOESN'T DRAIN AND GETS MOULDY LIKE CRAZY. End of public service announcement.)
I was happy that I would have one potato vine when I peaked in one day and....... a neighbor??

In the midst of February this thing was bound and determined to grow, and it DID... like gangbusters. You can see the white roots pushing up against the sides of the jar behind the label.
The only problem was that apothecary jars offer no drainage, and coffee grounds and dirt apparently don't drain worth a galldang. I have now tested this three times by accident, trust me... they do not. So a fine whitish blue fungus grew on the surface of the soil and eventually took out one of the vines.
I decided to transplant the other one to try and save it, and when I dug up the dirt, the stuff around the other potato just smelled of solid rot. There wasn't even anything left of the potato or plant, just black smoosh. So I quickly got the other plant out of there, dumped the entire thing of corrupted dirt, set it on fire with napalm, then sanitized it so that nothing would ever grow on the surface of that glass. Except I'm exaggerating, I just ran it through the dishwasher. The other vine, though, went to its happy home in a pot with drainage and plain, boring potting soil. It even had two tiny buds on it that looked like they might become potatoes!
I actually ended up having to move it from THAT pot in to an outdoor-ready pot, to accommodate the root growth and the inch or two of extra growth the vine put out.
I ended up accidentally tearing some of the roots, so it was only left with a couple to try and grow from. I was concerned for a bit, but it kept green. It stayed about 2 inches tall from then until I moved it outside to hang with the strawberries, trying to see if the sun and outdoor life would suit it. For size reference, that pot is about 6 inches tall.

I eventually moved it to the plant rack where everything is currently living happily, including our new seedlings (update on that later, there is news!) seeing that it was starting to grow a bit finally OMG WHAT HAPPENED TO THE POTATO????

So this thing is a MONSTER now, and that top part literally grew in 4 days, after 2 days of mist and rain and 2 days of 80 degree temperatures. I have to transplant it AGAIN. That will be the THIRD TIME. And I'm going to do it in a plastic pot, which is very big and will only be half full of dirt, so I can start mounding up because I need to get some of that stuff covered if I'm going to be getting more potatoes out of it! Needless to say, it likes its currently home and seems to be doing just ducky. I predict we'll have a nice-sized vine by the end of summer and quite a few tubers to try and dry-store and start the process over from again in the spring. I have in my mind an idea for a potato dynasty, all sprouted from the one ridiculously chewed thing my daughter brought home that acclimated to the Pennsylvania summers and crazy soil conditions to be hearty, delicious, and highly bake-able. And that's more than you needed to know about any potato ever, but will help you understand why I take so much pride in this little guy and why I'm bothering to keep him alive so much. I have the same type of story regarding my fruit trees, but that's a post for another week.
In the meantime, we were in the grocery store yesterday when I tried again, saying "This is a peach!" and watched her take a tentative bite from its flesh (we only pick up veggies and fruits we're buying anyway, as an aside. I don't let her chew on stuff we don't intend to use) chuckling that we might have a pet peach tree soon.... except....

...nope. Not this time. It was cleaned to the stone before we even got home and the pit had to be tossed before it could get sticky and end up in dirt princess's hair. Which is where all sticky things end up lately.

Ah well. Another time then. I still have three more peaches waiting to be snacked on, anyway.....

What We've Been Up To

As of now the house we are trying to sell is FINALLY on the market, and we're currently going through everything involved with trying to pretend we don't live in it to keep it clean while actually doing so with a dog that sheds massively and a very active nearly-two-year-old.
I'm REALLY lucky we started it on a holiday weekend. Otherwise I would probably already be in tears. We've already had one thing broken and one thing stolen during the open house, so my formerly excited and cheery outlook has been dampened in all of this.
BUT... in the mean time... I am still, as ever, getting ready for the next step! We will be moving to an apartment where I will be free to have a billion plants and dirt all over the deck, and this makes me AMAZINGLY HAPPY. Somebody just needs to want this house! SEND US GOOD MOJO! And now on to the part where I actually talk about being creative.
I'd been sitting on a project for a long time because I wanted to do it with my little girl. She is absolutely a dirt child, (we have nicknamed her dirt princess for how much she gets in to it) and loves scooping and playing in potting soil and touching plants. We picked out small metal buckets from the dollar bin at Target and I grabbed some fun and easy herb and flower seeds to plant while we were out taking a break from house sell-er-y the other day:

The only downside of this is that while we were in mega OMG HIDE EVERYTHING FOR THE OPEN HOUSE!!!!!!1!!one! mode, they ended up being stashed and we couldn't risk getting dirt everywhere.
So, yeah, there IS part of me resentful that my daughter and I can't have fun developmental playtime because things will get dirty and this might potentially displease people who aren't even going to buy the place.
Well, today it seemed like we had only 2 requests to view the house, and they were both in the morning. So I decided THIS was the best day to just make a mess on the back deck, let my child play in the dirt, and plant seeds together.
It was glorious. I loved every minute, and she loved every minute of it. Allow me to illustrate.

She was all business. I would hand her an empty bucket or pot, and she would scoop soil out of the big blue pot in to whatever was empty. I showed her how to press it down gently, then made holes to put seeds in with my thumb. The seeds may or may not have made it in to the soil. I would give her a few and sometimes she sprinkled them in the pot we were working on, sometimes she threw them in the big blue pot. That's okay, this was a learning period.
So we ended up planting quite a few things, and I became surprised at how many things we had going. I had to actually juggle pots, thinking we'd purchased too many originally.

The first thing we planted were teddy bear sunflowers. I had this image in my head of my daughter hugging a fuzzy plant as high as her. I told her we were making "teddy bears", and she happily dumped all of her seeds in the proper container. It's a bit bland, but as the starter container, it should do nicely. I expect we'll have a few billion because dirt princess did not skimp in seed distribution. I intend to transplant as many as possible, because I utterly ADORE sunflowers, and this is the only sunflower action we'll be seeing this year.




Then after that we planted two different kinds of lavender. We had had a devil of a time locating lavender seeds, probably because it's so popular to grow (and kill, apparently, based on the resale rate). So when I found the last two packets at Target the other day, I snagged them. We have one of just plain Angustifolia, and another of Munstead. What's the difference? Heck if I know. But it's my favorite plant/herb, so I wanted to have some growing on my deck this summer, for transplant next spring in to our official, non-swampy garden! (Please pardon the saddest looking Gerbera daisy in the world behind those two. I bought one at Trader Joe's for my birthday and for some reason it hates life. I'll have to go get another. :( )

Following that came the single hardest won herb seeds ever.... I could find literally NO rosemary seeds at any of six different places I went to. Maybe this is The Year of Rosemary Usage in Food and I missed the memo? So I found an old packet I'd never planted in the midst of packing and set it aside. Will it come up? I sort of doubt it, as I think the seeds are 2 or 3 years old. But if they do, BOOM! My second favorite herb is ready to go! Fingers crossed the seeds are still viable. I long for the days when I lived in the Pacific NW and managed to grow a rosemary bush the size of a dog. I'll settle for a potted lovely that I can move inside and outside with the weather and harvest as necessary.

After that we planted marigolds, because those are always fun and brightly colored, and I thought my girl would love feeling the seeds and seeing how they blew in the wind.... yup, she blew them alllll over the deck. That's okay, though, they gave us a ton in the packet! We also planted another container with teddy bear sunflowers, and a third one with chamomile. I'd initially planned for it to go with my strawberries, but the strawberry jar seems crowded enough already without attempting to side-load herbal starts that might die in the summer's heat. So I'll hang on to them and figure out how to use them to help my baby girl relax better at night. I've also never really enjoyed chamomile tea, and suspect it's because I've tried the heavily manufactured stuff. So I'll harvest the blossoms and see what comes of a pot of fresh brewed chamomile later this summer when I have Huge Baby Belly Syndrome and need help relaxing. And heck, if anybody else loves some, I LOVE to share.

In the end, our outdoor shelf looked quite spectacular with everything all lined up on it next to the already booming strawberries and the Girlchild's Pet Potato that has actually turned in to a potato vine. (Damn proud of that one, might I add! I've never grown potatoes in my LIFE and it's going gangbusters in a pot on the deck! Will need to transplant VERY soon, though!)
In the midst of all the craziness, taking a moment to do a bit of Earth Mothering and letting my child experience dirt and growing things made me feel good. It took away all the pent up frustration and the feeling that there is nothing of ME or my family left in this house, as we desperately try to cater to strangers walking through. The deck swept off easily enough, my daughter wiped down without issue, and we have lots of fun little plants to look forward to. I also got to create something, and my severe need to nurture and grow stuff that has come along with this pregnancy has been sated, if ever so briefly.

Plus... dirt princess had herself one hell of a time. Look at that. That child is walking with PURPOSE. Even if it WAS to dump dirt in the citronella candle, since it was the only bucket lacking soil.













The next project will be aimed at this bad boy, picked up on sale at JoAnne Fabrics for a ridiculous percentage of what they were originally asking. I have always wanted a Savage Garden filled with carnivorous plants, and once I get the seams coated with silicon and the base painted for water resistance, I'm gonna have me a fancy terrarium marsh of meat eaters!

And now... goodnight. We're super tired after wearing ourselves out with all of this good, earthy fun, and we're still kinda dirty and stinky and it's time for bath time and sleep time. Thanks for stopping by!