Last year we wrote a post called “Surprise Potatoes” following the appearance of several potato plants in various locations around the veg garden. None of these had been planned for and, at that stage, we thought they must have been due to a few potatoes finding their way into the bean trench. We therefore took care from then on to avoid adding whole potatoes - or even chopped up ones – to this year’s bean trench and our tiny compost heap.
In spite of this, even more potato plants have appeared this year, in even more places! This puzzled us at first but careful excavation around a few of the plants revealed the source. The evidence is shown in the photo below, since it turned out that the potato peelings we’ve been throwing on the compost heap were the culprits of this year’s surprise potatoes. It makes us wonder if it’s worth bothering with seed potatoes. Perhaps we should just dig in potato peelings next year and see what happens.
Now that we’ve discovered the source of our invasion, potato peelings are banned from the compost heap. The main problem is that our compost heap is small (approx. 1m3), which means that it doesn’t get warm and break things down like a large heap would. We’d be much better scaling up the worm compost bin. Hopefully worms like potatoes.
