I Dig Potatoes

Okay, you can go ahead and roll your eyes, but that title was the first thing that came to my mind and I'm sticking with it!  If I didn't grow anything else in my garden, with the exception of tomatoes of course, I would grow potatoes.  Who would've thought it could be so fun?  I can remember as a little girl, running in the garden behind my grandpa's tractor when he was turning the potatoes and excitedly picking them up and putting them in baskets.  But that is the extent of my experience with potatoes coming from any place other than the grocery store.  I knew absolutely nothing about planting them or how to take care of them once they were in the ground.  It's taken me a few years to get over my fear of "messing up" with gardening, but as of late I've adopted the "let's just put it in the ground and see what happens" mentality and that seems to be serving me well.  So what if it doesn't work, there's always next year to try again.  But I've learned that potatoes are really easy to grow. You can even grow them in containers if you don't have garden space.  You can read how to do that here.  What a great gardening project for kids, because they grow fast and everyone loves potatoes, right?  I planted mine in the area of my garden with the worst soil and they still rewarded me generously.  Back in March I picked up three varieties of seed potatoes from the local Feed and Seed - yukon gold, kennebec and red bliss.  I cut the potatoes in small pieces with at least one sprouting eye on each section, left them to cure for a few days and then planted three rows of each and waited.   After they started growing, I hilled the dirt up and put plenty of straw around them.  The turkeys and chickens thought I had put that straw there for them to scratch around in and I had to keep pulling it back up around the plants.  The potato beetles that I had to hand pick off my plants last year, never made an appearance this year.  Oh how glad I was about that!

By the end of June they looked like this and taking my cue from the wild turkeys (who had begun to dig them up), I decided they were ready to harvest.  Speaking of turkeys, they have been a huge pest to my gardening efforts.  They have no respect whatsoever for fences.  Here they are - inside the fenced raised bed areas

and they even fly into the chicken coop.

I enlisted Kenzie to help me dig the potatoes, promising her it would be a lot of fun.  Sounding more like work and less like fun, she was skeptical, but I knew after we dug the first plant she would be hooked.  Because digging potatoes is soooooo fun!

It always surprises me how you can plant one small little piece of potato and from it will grow a hill of four of five full size potatoes.

It's like unearthing a present each time you turn over the garden fork and you just can't help but get excited.

These beautiful potatoes came from that one little seed.

It's totally addicting and once we started digging, we didn't want to stop, until we had  pulled up every last plant.  I was so pleased with our little crop and we've been enjoying potatoes in every form you can imagine.  I love the little ones cooked with a pot of green beans.  I don't think I've ever tasted a potato salad that was as good as the one I made with potatoes that had been out of the ground for less than thirty minutes and barely had the dirt washed off of them. My favorite method this week is oven roasting with a little olive oil, salt and pepper, sprinkled with fresh dill and a tad of butter before serving.  Obviously we can't eat all these potatoes right away, so you know what that means don't you?   Honey, I need a root cellar...