Potatoes. I've been growing them since my first year, and like many crops, I've had good years,

and I've had terrible years. The last few years, the harvest I've gotten from my ground beds

has declined, and I'm not quite sure why. If it were only one year of poor production,

I could usually chalk that up to weather or disease,

because disease is certainly a factor in my garden. It doesn't matter what I do, especially with early blight.

A lot of times I can stave it off a little bit by using techniques like healing with straw and that kind of thing.

But eventually, I usually get early blight on all of my

potatoes. So that's one of those things that just is a continuous frustration for me. But in general,

if I'd only had one bad year, it really wouldn't be that big of a deal. But I'm starting to see a pattern,

especially the past few years, of declining production.

And because of that, I decided I wanted to test a few things. I want to try to figure out what

can I do to be able to increase my harvest of potatoes, at least to the level that it was

when I first started gardening, but even beyond that, because potatoes

are pretty much a staple in my garden as they are in a lot of people's gardens. In general,

they're pretty easy to grow. So to me, I've enjoyed being able to plant and harvest potatoes in

my home garden, not to mention that potatoes are usually pretty high on the list of the

dirty dozen crops. So I love being able to grow organically grown potatoes in my own garden.

This year I decided to test several different locations in growing my potatoes, thinking maybe

I could find the key there. So I planted in two different

ground bed locations with slightly different environments. I also tested growing in raised beds,

growing in grow bags, trying a late summer fall crop crop, and growing in grow bags again in the

fall. So in this episode, I'm going to talk to you

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