Thursday, October 22, 2009

Potatoes from my garden

What I don't manage to eat before it goes soft or gets hair or goes soggy or has worms, I put in the compost, or plant it. In July I planted all the leftover potatoes from a few bags I had accumulated. Luckily none were actually rotten (where they go soggy and smell like rotting flesh - yuck!), most were just a little too soft to seem nice to eat. So I planted them all.

The ones I planted in the back yard seem to have been a failure; whether it was for lack of sunlight, some bad juju in the soil (the pool backwash tends to spill over the area where I planted them), or higher mole activity, I don't know. But they barely got any leaves above ground.

By contrast, the ones in the front yard were almost immediately out, in the sun and growing like crazy. Even a month or so ago I started noticing little potatoes pushing up out of the soil. This can't be good for me to eat (solanine) but it was nice to see anyway. So last weekend I decided it was now three months and time to harvest the crop:


I'm so happy that there are some there that aren't totally tiny. Some that might as well have come from the shop! I'm not sure what to do with the tiny ones. Janine suggests using them in a salad. And the green ones freak me out. I should probably pare them down to nearly nothing if I want to survive eating them.

Anyone got some nice potato salad recipe that a kitchen-skills-challenged bachelor can make?