Potato Harvest

It doesn't look like I'll ever be a potato farmer, notwithstanding the generations of Irish peasant farmers in my ancestry.

I ordered organic fingerling seed potatoes last spring, and planted them in soil in two 5-gallon buckets, then used pine needles to mound up around the plants as they grew. It took me a long time to get around to harvesting my potatoes, but I wasn't worried; potatoes should be fine being stored in the ground. However, when Ben and I finally got around to it, we were sorely disappointed.

The entirety of my harvest amount to fewer than 2 dozen potatoes, most of them tiny. I had planted 1 lb of potatoes, a mix between French and Red Thumb fingerlings, and had believed promises that every pound of seed potatoes could yield 10-15lbs in harvest. I'm sure they could have, if handled properly; my parents planted a similar amount (from the same lot of seed potatoes) and had a much more substantial harvest.

I still have no idea where I went wrong.

Update

I haven't had a lot of luck with my cool-weather crops so far this year. The collards that surprised me by overwintering bolted almost immediately. (I cooked them up for dinner, buds and all.) Something is eating my baby bok choy seedlings, and only my baby bok choy seedlings, and yet I can't find anyone living in that container. And all of the new collards I planted this year have failed to come up, or have died immediately.

However, I have a number of bunching onions that seem to be doing well, although I think they could use a little fertilizer. (If only my worms were quicker with the compost - don't they know I have plants who need nutrients?!) My beets and carrots are still tiny seedlings, but so far they're doing well. And I have some lettuce seedlings that are doing better now that they're getting full sun on the roof (they had been mostly in the shade on the balcony), but I fear they won't last very long once it starts to get hot up there.

I'm hoping for better luck with my warm-season crops. I have a successful little tomato seedling that I hope to transplant into a larger pot soon, and another one that seems quite happy but is in no rush to develop its first true leaves. I also planted a bunch of squash and melons from saved seeds - watermelon, zucchini, and spaghetti squash. The spaghetti squash and the watermelon both got super-long only a couple of days after planting. I hadn't though that a seedling could get leggy before it developed its first true leaves, but the squash in particular is 6-8 inches long and floppy. Now that it's in a sunny windowsill with a light added, it seems otherwise quite happy, and I'm not sure whether I should be starting over or just seeing where these seedlings will go.

I'm also trying something new this year by planting potatoes. I ordered seed potatoes from groworganic.com, and am excited to see how they do!