Growing potatoes

My first two attempts at potatoes have been a total disaster so far.  Possibly because I just planted potatoes that had sprouted in the cupboard (not proper seed potatoes) and also because our soil had too much clay and went as hard as concrete.  I think we barely harvested more than we planted!  This put me off completely (I'm easily put off by my gardening failures), so I haven't tried again since.

However, when I think about what we produce, we have everything except a decent starchy staple cro[ that could be used as a carbohydrate in a meal if required.  I think that potatoes will be the easiest option (although I'm intrigued by some of the unique cereal suggestions on this blog AND we have some very vigorously growing arrowroot, which is supposed to be good for flour, I just haven't tried it yet).

So I have decided to have a decent go at potatoes this season, following the method seen here (or the results seen there anyway, now I see that the method was actually sent to me in an email) combined with some info from here.  Apparently a large container was used.  So I have an empty drum with the bottom cut out, that was previously used for compost, and I'm now building up  a compost/manure mix in preparation.  Then I'll get some decent seed potatoes (doing things properly this time, although the disappointment will be worse if it doesn't work, I'll have nothing to blame!) and when they have finished growing I can tip the drum over, fork out the potatoes and put the rest of the compost on the garden.

My potato drum (right) next to my weed tea drum and compost bin.

My potato drum filled with manure, comfrey, compost,
hay, lantana  that we pulled out.

On a side note, regarding cereals, one thing that I found very interesting when reading "The Ethics of What We Eat", was the conclusion that eating meat is unethical because we don't actually need it to survive and we could use the same land and water to produce more energy in cereal crops to feed the world.  This works for people who don't produce their own food, but I argue that if you produce your own and have land that's not useful for mass cereal cropping, you're better off raising animals to eat.  They're certainly less work!  Grain is the one thing that is very difficult to grow for a small producer, you need so much equipment to plant and process it.  Animals on pasture pretty much look after themselves.  We supplement feed ours a scoop of grain every day to keep them tame, but they would live without that (not that you'd believe it if you heard the hungry mooing at our place from 4pm onwards).

Have you had any success growing potatoes?  Or grain?