Purple potatoes - last years adventure and new plans

I snagged a couple of potatoes from the bag we bought at the store, I wanted to see if I could make them into seed potatoes and grow them in the two buckest we got. Our duplex at the time didnt have any useful windows to get sunlight from so we bought grow lights (not just for the potatoes, they were mostly a side project of mine). These three purple skinned potatoes sprouted shoots after some time - Im sure they would sprout faster if they had some sunlight, and someone told me you want the potatoe to have atleast 2 shoots.
(I love this photo - its taken with my phone blackberry priv. Those basil in the background provided us with yummyness throughout the season!)

Here you see how I just put the potatoes under the growlight (to the right in the picture). I put the tinfoil up to make the most of the light. ( You could clearly see this through our window, I wonder what our neighbours thought we were growing =P )

Here are the purple skinned potatoes with shoots and I put a couple of regular coloured ones there to grow shoots too.

This is what " Oh I will just grow a couple of things" looks like haha. Just had to share it as I found it scrolling through pictures looking for ones of our potatoes.
Im very happy this is not our situation this year, but I just wanted to show you that even if you dont have the optimal windows or a big house - you can still grow things, if you want :)

Okay, fastforward.
I planted the potatoes I got to sprout in a qtip box with soil covering them - do not use qtip boxes, they fall apart when they get wet, my common sense should have informed me of this but..oh well. So, once the shoots had grown longer I put them in the buckets. I just covered the bottom of the buckets with some soil, then put the potatoes in and covered them with soil. Then as the stalks/shoots continued to grow I covered with more soil until the bucket was filled with soil all the way to the top. Then you just keep on watering, they will bloom (or atleast they should, ours didnt but we ended up with potatoes anyways) and when the stalks/green dies down and turn yellow the potatoes are ready to be dug out.
Here is a more step by step guide to grow potatoes in containers https://www.growveg.com/guides/how-to-successfully-grow-potatoes-in-containers/
(dont put them in tires or other materials that will leak chemicals into your potatoes)

I couldnt find much for pictures of the progress of our bucket potatoes, besides this one. But here you see proof that it can be done - they were thriving :)

Even though we couldnt move in until August 1st at the acerage - we were allowed to put things in the garden sooner than that, these we planted June 29th.
Here we planted some sweet potatoes and Im about to stick some of the purple skinned potatoes in the ground too. We did end up buying seed potatoes from Holes greenhouse in St Albert (my favourite place, if you live close by make sure to stop by for one of their free classes or just walk around and enjoy the place!), because it was so late in the season we got them at half price i think.

We bought these seedling sweet potatoes, and one thing we learned the hard way is that if you dont massag the roots and kind of untangle them from the shape of the pot - you wont get very large sweet potatoes. The sweet potatoes we dug up at the end of the season looked like finger thick carrots. Nothing to eat really.
Brock, my husband is putting up stakes for our beans in the background - we used both a mesh inbetween and strings, neither worked very well so we have a new strategy this year.

What we did before planting was raking the soil into mounds, its how we did it when I was a kid growing up by the arctic circle (tho we used the tractor because our potato garden was on the bigger side, see picture below)

Its about 80 meter or so long - this is my grandmothers potato field, I have 6 uncles and an aunt on my dads side and a pile of cousins - this land kept all of us with potatoes for the year and we all helped out taking care of it. There is a gorgeous sand beach in the middle of the river - i like that one because there are basically no mosquitoes, but before dad would take us out there with the boat we had to weed atleast one row of potatoes =P

Anyways, back to last year.

Here, August 9th

August 15th
We planted the purple skinned potatoes, purple magic (another purple skinned but bigger kind of potatoe), Northland..hm. I tried looking in my garden journal but all I had written was "planted 3 kinds of potatoes" and then a couple of days later the purple magic..So, not to self - be more specific in garden journal.
But look at that beautiful purple flower :D

We got a decent harvest of potatoes, we took them up and cleared out our garden September 29th. The picture is from the end of the day, packing up the garden, it was a real great day :) Look at those trees dancing in the setting sun <3

Some of our potatoes and sweetie tomatoes. The tomatoes that hadnt turned red - we picked and kept in a bowl and ate as they changed colour from green or orange to red ! If you make sure the stalk and a piece of the branch comes with the tomato it will be more nutritious as it matures into red (same goes for ones you buy in the store!)

We stored our potatoes in this crate and ate from them until hm..december I think. Then we saved the rest for seed potatoes (besides the one Mumin managed to steal when we had forgotten to put another egg carton on top as lid - I never seen a dog so obsessed with raw squash and potatoes). These are the red russet we got from the greenhouse. I hadnt looked at them in a while, they are more than ready for spring - look at those shoots!!

These ones are from that ordenary coloured ones I started under the growlights :D They have shoots too, not as crazy.

Since last year our way of thinking has changed alot when it comes to gardening in general - this year we will shift things around a lot - I will cover why and how in upcomng posts.

Garden-ELF selfie with appropriate sunhat to not get burnt and knitted sweater because it somehow was cold too.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end of this post, I know its on the longer side but this garden-ELF gets a tad carried away when it comes to growing things :D