Apparently We Can Grow Potatoes

I’ve written about it a few other times, but it’s been a difficult gardening year for us. Weeds, pests, weather, and poor decisions have all contributed to struggles with tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, squash, and pumpkins. Thankfully, one of the vegetables we’ve been able to grow has been potatoes.

After receiving some rotten potato starts in 2025 and the healthy ones rotting in the soil instead of growing, we were intentional about how we grew them this year. All the potatoes came from Urban Farmer and arrived in perfect condition. We also decided to grow them in bags this year, which I wrote about in a previous post. This is by far the best decision we made for our garden this year. The bags were easy to plant in, could be maneuvered throughout the garden as needed, and the plants took off in all but one of the bags.

We harvested our first potatoes in early August when we pulled a bag of Red Norlands. We pulled them a bit early and probably could have gotten a bigger yield had we left them to grow a couple more weeks, but they tasted great and were firm with smooth skins. We got two meals out of the first batch.

Afterward, we were committed to leaving the potatoes in the soil until we were 100 percent certain that they were ready. We ultimately waited until this past Monday (Labor Day) to harvest another batch of them, and we pulled them from 10 bags, harvesting some of each variety we grew – Red Norland, Adirondack Blue, and German Butterball. We got roughly 10 pounds or so and gave some to our neighbors, but we still have a lot to eat. Plus, we have eight bags left to harvest. We’ve already tried some of the Adirondack Blues, and they were also delicious.

Potatoes Are My Favorite Vegetable to Grow

Successfully growing potatoes this year reminded me of why I love growing them so much. They’re relatively easy to grow compared to other vegetables, especially when grown in bags. They’re also fun to watch grow since the green “stalks” grow super tall and develop beautiful flowers. The most fun part is harvesting. We can lift the bags to make them easier to access so that we aren’t bending down so far. Diving into the soil to find the potatoes feels like searching for treasure, and when you think that you’ve found all the potatoes from one bag only to find a straggler, it’s an amazing feeling.

Our potatoes may have been successful this year, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for improvement next year. We had 20 bags, but it would have been better if we had another 10 or 20. We planted five potato pieces in each bag, and some of the bags felt a bit crowded. If we only had three pieces in each bag, I think we would have had an even better yield.

Two other ways that we can improve are having more soil in each and applying fertilizer again after the initial application. This year, each bag was about three-quarters full, but if we can top each bag off so that the soil is flush with the top, it will better protect the plants from the sun and help them grow more. We added a scoop of a balanced fertilizer when we planted the starts, but I never went back to fertilize the bags again. That would have certainly helped.

We had a blast growing potatoes this year and can’t wait to grow them again next year. We’ll likely try to grow more bags to have a better yield. We’ve even discussed giving Magz’s parents a couple of grow bags full of soil and starts next year so that they can grow potatoes next year. If you grew potatoes this year, how have yours been doing?