The Potato Project

A friend of mine told me about this great project sponsored by the Potato Council. The project is called, ‘Grow Your Own Potatoes‘ and it’s aim is to educate school children on where potatoes come from. By registering with them, your receive a free potato growing kit and can download free lesson plans and information on how to maximize your potato yield. Once you have harvested your potatoes, you weigh them and send in your results. There are great prizes to be won for the participating schools. As you work your way through your potato growing project, you send in photographs – it all adds to a fun and educational experience.

I thought that it would be a great project for us to work on in our homeschool. So I signed us up. Our kit arrived a week ago, and we set to chitting our potatoes. We are going to add another dimension to this project. We are going to plant some grocery store potatoes too and then compare our yield to the seed potatoes. In doing some research in why you should always use seed potatos, the main reason seemed to be because grocery store potatoes are generally treated with a sprouting retardant. But we have had some potatoes sitting in the back of our grocery cuboard and they have sprouted, we we thought we would give it a go and turn the whole project into a bit of a scientific research thing.

So here we are, today we have started the chitting process (sprouting and hardening off before planting). In two weeks time we will plant up our potatoes from our gyop potato kit as well as our grocery store potatoes. I’ll be sure to update you on the results :o)