Winter Garden

Over the 2021-22 winter, I've started a small novel side project: indoor container gardening and composting. I am starting with nine potato plants in a 4'x2' trough located in a covered porch area.

Potato Garden Notes

• Unfortunately, the online seed potatoes stores I found do not stock seed potatoes for a winter garden. Non-organic potatoes are covered in an inhibitor to keep them from sprouting. Organic potatoes sprout much faster and are ideal seed potatoes.
• Start with letting the potatoes get going with sprouting. Reading through, a lot cut the potatoes up and plant each eye seperate. I settled for just planting the entire potato.
• The potatoes like to be moist, but not drenched. They can handle temperatures in the low forties or even upper thirties so long as the soil itself is above freezing.
• There is a process of "hilling" the potato as it grows. I started my potatoes in 4" of soil. Once they reached 6" tall (roughly 3 weeks in), I added roughly 3" more inches to the container and continued hilling until they were buried 9" deep. This (I suppose) encouraged additional potato growth.
• Early or new potatoes can be harvested in 90 days. Late potatoes (which includes the fingerlings I planted) are roughly 110 days. Planting the potatoes on December 3rd, gives a harvest date of March 28th.

Areas to Expand?

• Potential areas to expand: other kinds of tubers such as carrots, radishes, parsnips, beets, or turnips; perhaps cabbages or salad greens; I've seen success with bean sprouts in mason jars.

Vermiculture

Currently collected 10 gallons of compost.

Linked References

• victory-garden
  

  The [[Winter Garden]] experiment over the winter of 2021-22 in which I started growing potatoes in our Arizona room is slowly growing into a full fledge victory garden.