How many potato chips have we eaten without ever having made our own from potatoes grown in our garden? For me, the number was probably tens of thousands of potato chips made by others before ever making my own. Today I am grateful to share the joy of making my own potato chips from growing the potatoes in my garden to eating the potato chips below!

Behind me we see my garden a few months after starting it including tomatoes in the upper left, kale in the upper right, and a few of the potatoes in the lower right. This post two months ago shows what it looked like when I planted and first started!

Growing the potato plants in Florida from about February to May was easy including just planting seed potatoes I ordered on Amazon in grow bags, adding some dirt as the plants grew out, and watering daily until the plants turned from green to yellow.

Once the plants turn to yellow, I dumped the grow bags out into another container to harvest!

Blogs I read online about homegrown potatoes suggested trying many colors and types instead of just growing the russet potatoes most of us buy in the store. The seed potatoes were almost the same cost and as we can see I grew several kinds of potatoes!

What amazed me is how four potatoes planted into the ground turned into that entire plate above within just a few months! That plate is all from one grow bag planted with three different kinds of potatoes.

I planted about 10 grow bags and got a total of 10 or 20 pounds of potatoes from about 40 seed potatoes meaning the potatoes approximately quadrupled in quantity in a few months. The box above is about half of the total yield while the seed potatoes were less than half of that to begin with.

After washing, I cut up the potatoes into small slices and threw them all into a plastic container to put the olive oil, garlic power, and Italian seasoning on them for roasting!

Madeleine and I spend a few hours together every afternoon with this day making potato chips together! She is the best helper!

Once all the potatoes are washed, cut up, and seasoned, I followed a blog's advice to cook at 425 degrees Fahrenheit which is 218 Celsius.

I used a tray with holes in the bottom named AirBake because this helps avoid burning on the bottom allowing for more even cooking on kale chips especially.

Instead of using a timer, I just rotated the tray and kept tasting the chips to see when they were done!

After around 20 to 30 minutes, the chips were cooked perfectly and this is how they looked finished!

While I ate most of the chips straight up without adding anything else, I dipped a few in my homemade black bean hummus! The one downside to dipping potato chips in hummus is what I call "double oil" because the hummus is made with oil and so are the potato chips effectively doubling the amount of oil necessary for taste. By comparison, when I dip cucumbers, carrots, and other vegetables in the hummus, they do not have any oil.

Thank you very much for reading about my homemade potato chips grown from my own garden! The posts I have read on Steem slowly over about six months inspired me to start gardening a few months ago and to plan to grow as much of my own food as possible going forward. I intend to continue paying that forward on my posts indefinitely here because connecting with the earth and relaxing is easy in a garden!

According to a few books I have read which match my own intuition, food grown in our own gardens appears to have the most health benefits because the plants dynamically adapt to what we need the same way a mother's milk adapts to what the baby needs.

For our environment, what can be more local than a garden in our backyards which eliminates the need to hire people to grow as much food for us, transport that food to a grocery store, and then take our time and money to go shopping for it assuming we do not hire someone to do that as well?

We easily can feed everyone on this planet when we grow our own food at home and help each other where we have excess. I have another garden update coming soon and am continuing to expand my garden every month until it takes the least effort and produces the most food in the available space!

Love,

Jerry Banfield

Shared on:

• Facebook page with 2,256,504 likes.
• YouTube channel with 236,146 subscribers.
• Twitter to 101,590 followers.

Let's stay together?

• If you want to stay updated via email, will you sign up either to get new emails daily at http://jerry.tips/steemposts or join at http://jerry.tips/emaillist1017 to get an email once a week with highlights?
• If you would like to chat, will you please visit https://jerrybanfield.com/contact/ because there we see the best ways to contact me?

Our Most Important Votes on Steem are for Witness!

• If you do not know what a witness is on Steem, will you please read https://steemit.com/steemit/@gmichelbkk/what-is-a-steem-witness-how-to-vote-and-why because our votes for witnesses determine our future together here on Steem?
• If you have never made a witness vote before, will you please set me as a proxy at https://steemit.com/~witnesses or https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-proxy?proxy=jerrybanfield&approve=1 because you will feel good about helping select witnesses while I do all the work to maintain the votes for you?
• If you already have voted for witnesses and prefer to update your own witness votes, will you please place your vote using at https://steemit.com/~witnesses or https://steemconnect.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=jerrybanfield&approve=1 because most of us feel a sense of belonging here when we begin choosing our witnesses?