The Leggiest Potatoes

So, I like to think I have a green thumb, but sometimes my experiments go a little crazy on me. As you can see on the right, I'm currently in possession of the world's leggiest potato plants growing in my garage.

This whole experiment started when a friend told me that her neighbor or somebody managed to grow and harvest container potatoes by letting them overwinter in the garage. The fact that this conversation took place in a bar after dance class maybe should have been my first clue that I wasn't necessarily receiving high quality gardening information.

Anyway, as you know, I had a bag of potatoes go bad and start sprouting this fall, so I put them in my potato containers, and, once the weather started to dip, brought them inside from within the makeshift cold frame where they had been living.

The idea here was that the weather would turn cold, and the garage would be cold but not freezing. Therefore, the big plan was that the plants would go dormant and then pick up growth next spring when I could move them back outside.

As it turns out, we have been blessed with one of the warmest Decembers in quite a while, and my potatoes won't go to sleep.  So, they are eagerly climbing up toward the window seeking the sunlight instead of staying nice and squat for the winter.

Since I invested exactly $0 in this little experiment (thanks to already having all the materials and planting store potatoes that had started to sprout), I'm just going to leave them there and see if they succeed in living, and, if they do, if they produce any potatoes.

But you can imagine the look on my face when I went out into the garage after not being out there for a couple of weeks and found this mess going on.  Yeesh!