Of all the things I’ve planted this year, potatoes have caused the most worry.
I’ve grown potatoes twice before. Once they did well, once they did nothing at all. According to my reference book, I could plant them April 1. The shipping schedule of my supplier should have had them here in plenty of time to prep and plant by then. The Covid-corrupted shipping schedule had them here a month late. I threw them in their grow bags between 12 hour shifts at work and hoped for the best.
They’re growing like gangbusters. They’ve been in the dirt a month and they already have flowers forming. I think flowers mean the tubers are growing, and the tubers cannot be exposed to light because that makes them turn green and green tubers are poisonous. So yesterday I frantically threw more dirt on them before another 12 hour shift at work. It was the second time I had “hilled” more dirt around the stems. It was also the last, because now I am out of dirt.
Potato towers 
Flowers forming on potato plants
I’m worried that the yield in the grow bags won’t be substantial enough to be cost effective. In the grocery store conventionally grown potatoes are about $0.80 per pound. Organic are $1.50 per pound. I spent $19.95 on seed potatoes. I’ll have to grow 13.3 pounds of potatoes (I used the organic cost) to break even. I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
I’ll have to see if I can squeeze another raised bed into the space allotted me for next year. Even a 4′ x 4′ bed would be triple the growing area of the two grow bags. It’s worth investigating.
Update: August 9, 2021: My concerns about yield were well founded. Each grow bag only produced about five pounds of potatoes, which is better than nothing I suppose, but certainly not what I was hoping for. I’m not blaming the potatoes, though. Any shortcomings were definitely my fault. They did the best they could in the space they had. Next year I have to make room for them in one of the raised beds.
