Potatoes. Maybe.

I’ve been setting aside the brown paper bags my groceries get delivered in for months now. I had seen a video where a couple of Canadian homesteaders used a pretty cool method to grow potatoes. They laid old paper sugar sacks directly on the grass, some spoiled hay on top, potatoes placed on that and then they piled more hay up as the potatoes grew. They harvested the potatoes by pulling back the hay, and at the end the ground underneath was grass-free, soft and beginning to absorb the broken down hay. 

Some time in August (late winter here), I bought a couple of bags of seed potatoes, laid them out in ratty old basket trays and set them aside in the laundry to chit (this encourages the seed potatoes to sprout before you plant them).

You need to hold off planting until the last frost has passed. This is a guess, because who really knows. We’ve all been surprised by late frosts. But traditionally it is considered to be around Labour Weekend here in New Zealand which is the last weekend in October (and is also the weekend that gardeners everywhere plant out their tomato plants).

The potatoes had chitted nicely, but Labour Weekend came and went. I was missing the vital ingredient—hay. It wasn’t yet hay-making season, so any hay available was leftovers from farmers’ winter feed stock—hay made last summer. It was thin on the ground. I also needed someone that would deliver because the idea of me hauling two dozen 25kg bales onto a trailer and off again made me laugh-cry.

Really, I was just hoping that somehow the hay would magically arrive without me organising it, the potatoes would be laid out for me by the potato faeries (I’m Irish—it’s a thing), and my only job would be picking out perfect little jersey benne potatoes from the sweet hay in time for Christmas dinner.

Well, Christmas is ten days away, and I just sowed the potatoes. On top of the (very) late sowing, my method has diverted a little from that of the Canadian homesteaders. When I looked back at their video yesterday, I note that they cut their grass very short before starting. Me, I just lopped off the giant dock stalks and kind of granny-step shuffled over the long grass to lie it flat. Getting the paper bags to stay put on top of it was a little tricky. There was quite a bit of slip-sliding. 

I also notice that they did this part of the process, including putting down the first thick layer of hay, a little way ahead of planting. So the potatoes were getting put onto something a bit more damp, a bit more composted, and possibly more likely to help the potatoes grow. 

Nonetheless, the bags went down, the hay went down, the potatoes went down and then got covered up. There may or may not be potatoes to harvest at the end of this. They were well and truly chitted but the potatoes themselves were a little on the shrivelled side. I guess all those little sprouts had sucked the mother potato dry. I don’t know if there will be enough nutrients for the potato plant to grow. 

I’ll be looking out for green shoots appearing through the top of the hay mound. My job now is to keep mounding the hay up around the shoots because that’s where the potatoes will be growing from. The packet says 100 days to harvest. So I guess they will be Easter potatoes, not Christmas ones. If, indeed, there are any potatoes to harvest at all. 

But potatoes or not, this patch of ground will be ready to take new plantings in autumn. The grass will be gone, the soil will be richer from the broken-down hay, and the vege garden will have expanded just a little. (But I am really, REALLY hoping for spuds.)