Potatoes the unconventional way.

Before I start let me just say that j have never grew a potato in my life!

However, I have a compost heap for kitchen scraps which I solely use for harvesting worms for angling and my fish tanks.

And of course plenty of potato peelings and out of date potatoes get thrown in too.

And it doesn't matter what I do, but new potato plants start to grow from even the tiniest bit of old potato! I just pull them up, I'm not really that interested in having potatoes in my compost heap.

And then I started thinking. If I allowed the potato plants to grow and mature, would the plants eventually produce a fat crop of spuds? Or would potatoes not develop at all?

Thanks for any advice.

 

Yes, I think you would get some. It only takes one 'eye' to produce a stem root to carry new tubers. In some communities, eyes are sold for planting but cannot recall which community.
When you plant a complete 'seed' potato you are probably planting 6-8 eyes and get typically 12-16 new tubers therefore expect your crop to be proportionate.
Given that the parts discarded when peeling/rejecting are most likely to have some disease/defect, your 'free' crop is unlikely to be of the best.
Why not try some ?

 

So it's the eye of the potato, the bit you usually cut out when preparing spuds for cooking, which is the all important part of the potato? I didn't know that.

I have a bit of a raised bed. I might take some of the young plants from my compost heap and transfer them over and see what develops.

If I wanted to do the job proper though would I plant actual full potatoes, preferably ones with lots of eyes!

 

I've got a forest of potatoes that have come up from the tiniest spuds left in the ground from last year.
I just let them grow if I dont want the space and any thing they produce is a bonus, usually something half decent come from it.
I dont put potato peelings on my compost heap for the very reason you are saying, its not something I want in the compost.

 

If you look at the average allotment, the compost heap will have plenty of potatoes and probably squash growing on it. We have a decent amount of potatoes coming up from where we grew them last year and it's very hard to find them all when cropping. They normally provide a decent amount.