(You can't see the whole message but this child wrote on her bucket "We Love Garden Class"

Well tomorrow's class is going to be potato in a bucket!  We have white buckets and seed potatoes that we will be using.  The children will have markers so they can decorate their own buckets.  As the plants grow the kids can add either soil, leaves or grass clippings to the bucket to cover the new tubers as they are formed.  I am telling you I learn something new everyday about this stuff.
1.  Potatoes are NOT roots they are stems.  That is why they have their own name "tuber"
2.  Potatoes are members of the nightshade family.  When they were gifted to Queen Elizabeth the first, the chef thought the tubers were ugly so he cooked the greens instead.  This made the whole Queen's dinner table ill and they banned potatoes from the court for several hundred years!
3.  Sir Walter Raleigh (yes the colonist) was the one who gifted the plants to the Queen.  SWRaleigh also had a home in Ireland where he took the potato and cultivated it.  In Ireland the potato grew so well for the poor that it quickly became the staple.  1.5 acres grew enough potatoes to feed a family of 6 for a year.  Each person ate 10lbs of potatoes a day!  Then in 1845 the famous potato famine hit, the black rot.  Within 3 years more then 1 million people starved and another million left Ireland for the United States.  Scientists are still working on a potato resistant to this fungus!
Once while hiking with a friend in Colorado we found an old homestead.  As I stood on the spot of the old homestead I looked down to see that the sagebrush looked like it was in rows and rows as if it had been planted.  I commented to my friend that it looked like the brush had been planted.  He smiled and said no that was potatoes.  He said the early settlers who came from Ireland tried to grow potatoes in our harsh area in mass quantities and it had not worked out for them.  I am sure it was much to rocky in the particular area as potatoes do grow well in Colorado.  I will update pics of the potato buckets tomorrow.