A Potato . . . Tree?

A few months ago we had an empty planter box, bad weather, and a potato that was too sprouted and yucky to do anything good with. So I figured, what the heck, why not combine it all and see what I get!

I read up a little bit on growing potatoes (and learned that you’re never, ever, supposed to grow potatoes from ones you buy at the store, you’re supposed to use special seed potatoes. Pbbtth, whatever! I actually wasn’t too concerned about eating what I grew, I just wanted to see what a potato plant would look like!) and learned that potatoes grow on a vine and that as the vine grows up out of the dirt, you’re supposed to keep burying it so that it’s always growing more potatoes underground. I was envisioning a tidy little mound of dirt with just a few leaves growing out of it and a couple potatoes hiding in the dirt, sort of like the way a carrot grows. That sounds reasonable, right?

WRONG!

Is this what you thought a potato plant would look like? Not me!

Apparently, potatoes do NOT grow in delicate little hills like I had envisioned. In fact, this is probably the biggest and bushiest plant I’ve ever grown (my tomatoes last year probably would have been pretty big, until that monster rodent destroyed them to make a nest out of . . . I’m still bitter about that!) And it grew quickly, too. I’d reburied it’s little leaves a few times, but it seemed to stay about the same size for a little while, and then the next time I looked out the window, BAM! Full on potato shrub!

So I figured I should probably try to find a way to bury the rest of the plant before it started to grow up the walls.

Here is what it looked like after I buried as much of it as I could.

I left it at that, and then came out to check on it the next weekend.

Holy cow, new growth!

Just a week later, and it has flowers and new stalks are sprouting straight up off of the previously buried stalks! WOW! So (as you can kind of see in that last photo, off to the left) I’m starting to run out of dirt to bury things with, and there isn’t much more room before I spill over the lip of the planter. I am so incredibly curious at this point to see what we end up with in a few more weeks If nobody has heard from me by the end of the month, come check on my apartment and make sure it hasn’t been overrun by a potato plant

Update 10/11/11 – Find out what ended up happening to the potato plant here.

Tagged as: anecdotes, randomness