Po-ta-toes? Mash 'em, boil 'em, stick 'em in a stew!

Well I finally broke. My curiosity got the best of me and I couldn't wait any longer to see what all was going on in my potato buckets.

I know you're supposed to wait for the vines to die, but I rationalized my decision by the fact that they weren't in an ideal growing environment to begin with, and the vines were turning yellow and loosing leaves, so death couldn't be that far away, right?

I had experimented with a variety of bucket configurations, mulching one with leaves, one with newspaper, and one un-mulched. Also half of the buckets had vapor barriers which didn't really get a chance to serve their purpose since the sprinkler system was put in, watering everything twice a day.

So this is what I ended up with out of four buckets and four Yukon Gold seed potatoes:

And here's the total bounty of the garden thus far, excluding a dozen or so leaves of mustard greens:














Hooray food!

You still have plenty of time to put in some fall crops like carrots, beets, turnips, spinach, brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, zucchini, pumpkin, or many others. I'm probably gonna do carrots, turnips, beets, and spinach in my containers once the tomatoes and beans finish up.