spuds in sacks

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I’ve never properly planted potatoes, though once I did stick a sprouty spud into the window-box and forgot about it; months later I wondered what was growing and investigated; had half a dozen spuds to go with my dinner.

But proper spud-growing is a lot of work, I’ve read; the plants have to be ridged up as they grow, again and again and again.

I got a “potato planter” – one of those round nylon things. The instructions said to half-fill the tub and plant three potatoes. As they grow, add soil to raise the level.

Only three spuds? I thought; that’s not going to feed me for long. And I put it to one side and forgot about it.

I had some starting-to-be-sprouty potatoes in the fridge, and I thought about planting them. But only three at a time in a single tub?

But then I had a thought …

Why not use old compost sacks instead? Roll them down, plant them, and then unroll the tops and top up the soil as the plants grow.

So I had a go.

18th July

Found several clean sacks – well, clean on the inside, where it matters – and put a couple of holes in for drainage.

Chucked some bark in the bottom, added some soil. I had no idea how much soil I should put in, but I filled about a third – hard to tell when the upper bit’s rolled over on itself.

I scooped out some soil in my going-to-be-raised-bed-veg-garden-when-I-get-round-to-it. I’d been dumping spent soil from repotting plants to use as a base layer, and so I hadn’t been watering it: it had baked hard, and I wasn’t able to get down as much as I wanted.

(Even apart from that, access was a problem: I had a stack of bricks on one side, a holly bush too close on the other side, and a buddleia behind – plus some assorted chunks of discarded brick and concrete underfoot.)

But I managed to scrape out a shallow trough, then put the sacks in, piling dirt around the outsides and between the sacks to both support and insulate.

Placed the cut potatoes, three bits per sack – I’d read that they should be cut so that each piece had a sprouty bit.

I had enough bits for four sacks – with an extra bit stuffed into one of them.

I also had some new potatoes which had been in the fridge for too long; they weren’t sprouty, but they were looking a bit sad and wrinkled, so I shoved them in too, whole. They’re in the white sacks.

Watered them all in and forgot about them.

Until …

4th August.

I unrolled the sacks a bit and put some more compost in. I wasn’t sure how high to take it, but raised the soil level to about an inch under the lowest leaf.

[No sign of life from the white sacks, but to be fair, they weren’t even slightly sprouty when I put them in]

I’m making this up as I go along, so I’m going to make a lot of mistakes – probably already made a few, just not realised it yet.

One thing I did realise: I should have dug the sacks deeper into the ground – if I’d had a pickaxe and room to swing it! But I intend the eventual raised bed to be higher than this, so that should give me more “planting depth” in future.

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I don’t know how tall the plants will grow, so how much I’ll need to unroll the sacks. I’ll have to use bamboo canes to support them.

I also don’t know when to harvest them. (When I was thinking about trying spuds at my old address, I was driven fairly frantic by online advice on “how to” and “how not to” but not a sausage on “how do you know when they’re ready to dig up?”)

But if this works, it’ll be very handy in so many other ways:
I can extend “sack plating” to other veggies, or plants [I already have, but that’s another blog!];
I can make the sacks, round, square, oblong, whatever I need them to be to fit the available space, rather than have a shape forced on me;
I won’t have to buy “purpose” planters; I’m re-using plastic sacks of which I have a stack and a half.

• 9 Aug, 2017
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