Garden Notes

Rogue potato growing in compost bin

I have been faithfully composting my kitchen scraps and a lot of the garden waste from our yard for a few years now. Usually, the contents in my compost bins just perk along and eventually look sort of like soil, at which time I remove the compost and distribute it around the yard. This harvesting of compost usually happens late in the
fall or very early in spring for me.

This year when I opened up one of the compost bins to start the spreading process,
I saw a spindly, sad little potato plant struggling to reach the sun. I decided that if it really wanted to live that badly, I would give it a chance and I left the cover off of
the bin.

Well, that potato greened up overnight and started to grow with a vengeance.
It is now about 18 inches high with no end in sight. Since compost shrinks as it decomposes, I have been still adding new materials to the rest of the bin and this
has had the effect of “hilling up” the potato.

I have no idea at this point if I will get any potatoes from this plant or if this will end
up as a bad experiment in compost agriculture. But, whatever the outcome, I am intrigued by that ambitious potato making the best of a bad situation and trying to “bloom where it’s planted”.

This article is part of a series on composting.

Read follow-up article: “Rogue Potato Family”