This spring I had quite a few leftover seed potatoes. I hated to waste them, but I had no other places I could plant them. Then I got an idea. But first, let me give you some background…

Last spring I dug out a good chunk of sod to make way for a hedge. I threw all that sod in a pile out in the pasture. By this spring it had all decomposed into lovely soil. In fact, I had used scooped out some of the dirt for my raised beds earlier.

So now with extra seed potatoes and no place to plant them, I decided to just dump them at the base of my sod heap (where I had scooped out some soil earlier) and kick some dirt over top of them. (There was a pile of old hay nearby, so I threw some hay on a few of them to see if it would make a difference.) If they grew, great – extra potatoes for me! If they died, well, no big loss.

Since then, I’ve done nothing with them (no water – no weeding). I went out to the pasture to check on them this afternoon, and what do you know! Potatoes were growing. And they looked pretty good. They weren’t even covered in weeds! They looked… well, like this…

Needless to say, I was impressed. So I will continue to neglect these potatoes and see if, at the end of their life, they will yield me any freebies.

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