I thought you might like to see how the potatoes are doing.

It was a cloudy day when I took these pictures and this one was with a flash. The rest of them are without. I am not a very good picture-taker so I hope you will be patient with me as I bumble through, thinking a poor picture is better than no picture.

I will add chopped leaves, or maybe some aged wood chips, to the tubs as the plants grow. Some plants will grow potatoes all up their stems if they are gradually covered over, but I understand some won't. It depends on the variety of potato. Mine are just grocery store potatoes that sprouted before we could get them eaten, so I have no idea "what I'm gonna get". Even if they don't increase their production this way, at least the extra coverage will keep the potatoes that do grow from turning green.

We bought these dollies at a garage sale, they were not priced as low as most of the things that I buy but the thing about garage sales is that you never know what kind of unusual things you're going to see, and if it's something that would cost about as much for you to make yourself in time and materials, it's worth paying what they ask for. Sometimes if you offer to buy them all, the person running the sale will bring the price down some. They didn't in this case, but we didn't buy when we first saw them. I thought about it after we got home, and then asked Hubs if he would go back and see if they were still there. Many times, when I'm not sure whether I should buy something, I do this. That way, I leave it up to "the universe" or whatever you want to call it. If it's still there, then it should be mine. If it's gone, then it wasn't to be. In this case, they were still there, and they were getting about ready to close down the sale. The man still wouldn't bring his price down, but he did "throw in" a small gas tiller that was in working order. We didn't really need it, but oh, well. Then Hubs made another dolly out of a piece of exterior plywood he had in his scrap stash and some rollers he took off a broken cart before he threw the broken parts away.

The tubs also came from two different garage sales. Some of them were 75 cents each and some were $1 each. Such a deal. Had we not found these, I would've used totes. They are nice because they have lids that can be popped on for extra protection from the weather if the plants are still small. But the totes are usually not as heavy gauge plastic as the tubs are, and they won't last as long.

One year, I grew potatoes in those huge plasticized bags that chicken feed comes in. I just folded the tops over a couple of times to help with stability, poked a couple holes in the bottom of the bag, and leaned the bags against the fence before I filled them with potting soil. These did double-duty that year by shading out the weeds that grow along the fenceline. Less for Hubs to weed-wack. And the more I'm able to keep Hubs out of the garden with the weed-wacker, the better.

Of course, anything you have in a container needs to be watered more often than you might water something in the ground. The nice thing about having things in tubs that can be rolled around is that you can plant early. If you have them on the driveway and it suddenly threatens frost, you can push them all into the garage.

In most of the tubs, I planted about 6 pieces of cut-up potatoes after I'd left them on the counter for a few days to dry out the cuts a little. Each piece had at least one sprout. That littlest plant you see is one that I broke off a potato accidentally. I immediately stuck it into a glass of water and it made roots, so I just planted it. Might as well.

I'm not sure why we do "irish potatoes" different than sweet potatoes. When I was first gardening, I didn't know we were supposed to break the sprouts off sweet potatoes and root them. I just cut up sweet potatoes into seed potatoes like I always did regular potatoes and I always got a crop. I've never actually made a "slip" from a regular potato, so I guess this little guy qualifies as another one of my Wild Hair Experiments.

Which reminds me, I watched a YouTube last year where a guy was propagating pieces of his growing sweet potato vines to make himself a bigger crop. I tried to find it again and couldn't, but here's one that's close. The actual process starts about 2 minutes in, but you might like to watch the first 2 minutes because he shows some really neat scarecrows he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Ntf4Xo-Mg

I'm not sure if I will grow sweet potatoes this year. I'm the only one that eats them, and I haven't been even doing that this winter. I think the ones in the pantry are busy making slips without any intervention from me, I will have to go check them. Might plant a few, if only to keep being able to make slips from what I have every year instead of buying them from somewhere.