You have no idea how happy I am! Whenever I try to grow potatoes, something goes horribly wrong. This year, without even trying, I got a potato! :):):) Okay, it was only ONE TINY potato, but it WAS a potato! My husband and I shared it the other night and it was delicious, a bit nutty in flavor.
Here is our compost bin, that my husband built, in which the little red potato grew ("The Little Red Potato," sounds like a children's book! You're welcome to write it, I'm not going to.). Since we have tons of leaves, we needed to build this large bin to put them in and of course we also add our raw produce scraps and yard clippings, in addition to wood scrap from my husband's wood shop. That's pretty much all that goes into our compost. I am a compost purist, so I do not use any paper products (due to chemicals), no household dirt & dust (yes I've heard of people doing that-bad idea), no cooked food, no meat, no excrement, no animal products except for rinsed egg shells. And I make awesome compost. With lots of worms in it. Stuff can't help growing in it! So when I saw this potato plant coming up, I decided to leave it alone and see what would happen. It only grew that one little one, but it was a fun experiment. I always like to do things outside the box and see what happens. To me, gardening is very much about experimentation. In fact, due to all the variables involved in gardening, it really is always something of an experiment. I hope one day to get more than one tuber from a potato plant-I will not give up! (Yes, that's my son's old swing in the background, from when he was little-we still haven't cut it down-they grow up so fast!)