Trademe auction #2: 2.5 kg sprouting potatoes

Other than the fact that they're sprouting, the potatoes are your usual edible multi-purpose supermarket potato. There are around 25 potatoes in the sack. Pick up would be from Auckland CBD, and it would be the wisest choice.

Since they are not at all green, they are quite edible, though the texture would probably approach that of yams. For what purpose would you buy a 2.5 kg sack of sprouting potatoes?

Here's some calculations. Assuming each of the 25 potatoes produces one potato plant and each plant produces 1 kg of potatoes (dependent on your soil conditions, with compost being the ideal soil), the yield after a year is 25kg. At 0.5 kg of potatoes per meal, that's enough for someone to have potatoes for dinner once a week for a whole year.

This operation can even be carried out on a patio. $2 10L buckets and compost are readily available and after drilling drainage holes in a bucket, one potato plant would grow quite happily. Tomatoes can even be grafted directly onto the potato to save even more floor area.

Personally from my past experience, I think for families with kids, it's more fun to dig for potatoes out of the soil, kind of like searching for pirate treasure, and have baked jacket potatoes afterwards. A small 1 x 10 metre stretch of lawn can easily be converted to garden space, and as mentioned before, tomatoes grafted on top.

Among my most treasured memories are of baking potatoes I dug up myself and self-caught brown and rainbow trout by wrapping them in tinfoil and burying them in the hot ashes of a bonfire. The trout was caught from the river just a couple hundred metres away, and the potatoes were growing wild as weeds in the surrounding field. The firewood was dead radiata pine used in the windbreaks on the edge of the field. Tinfoil and matches were more or less the only consumables that weren't supplied by the land. Make the most of our fair New Zealand, contribute to our economy and reduce foreign debt, by planting your backyard with productive crops like these potatoes!