Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea. In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground. I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched back the surface of the earth to reveal good-sized Purple Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes. The sets of early March had in 80 days become about 15 pounds of good eats.
And eat them we have. We pan-fried them in the mornings with butter, onions, and pepper. We cooked and blended them with leeks for a fine soup. We dribbled them with olive oil, dashed them with fresh rosemary (from the yard), and baked them. We boiled them and diced them for crumbled-blue-cheese-prosciutto-dill potato salad, and tossed them in with a roast to soak and simmer all day.
We ate them baked plain because the fresh spuds are so flavorful they need nothing added.
At least as many potatoes still sit in the yard, ready for harvest.
This haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009). Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems that I remedied this spring by working plenty of mulch and compost into a fairly sunny plot before planting. The 80 or so days they took to mature is about 20 short of expected, but done is done. A new round of Yukon starters are in the ground for early fall eating, as well as a few rows of a russet-type potato we’ve never tried before called a Carola.
If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.
The potato-surplus coincides fortuitously with our need to keep my wife off dairy till we can calm our mildly colicky baby girl. We have plenty of potatoes to go with the meat in the mostly meat and potatoes diet that we’ll be sticking to for a few weeks.
It’s nice to find we have just what the doctor ordered right out the back door.
Nice indeed to have just what the doctor ordered right outside the back door.
This line, though, speaks to me on a deep level. Good title. Good line for a book. Good line for poetry.
“If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.”
It could also become an adage, no? I see you and Sarah in rockers and you saying to great, great grandchildren: “If these keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.” Kids shaking their middle-aged heads saying, “we’re not sure where he came up with that, but he always says it.”
You got 15 lbs. of potatoes! Awesome. We ate the blues that we had planted and really enjoyed them.
I’m definitely going to say “potatoes til Christmas” every time that I see you. And I’m going to make Charlotte a shirt.
Also, nice pic of the roasted potato.
Potatoes are definitely my desert island food. LOVE THEM!!!
I’m trying to grow them this year, but am not holding out much hope.
If a Doctor ordered potatoes, I certainly wouldn’t refuse. We planted ours a little late this year, but I can’t wait to start pulling them up. I’ve honestly never met a potato I didn’t like.
Baby girl?! Congratulations buddy.
Fortuitus-that means lucky. : )