Potato Rich

    Last Spring when I was planting my garden, I planted seven rows of potatoes.  That was one more row than I usually planted.  I didn’t really need that extra row, six rows are usually plenty, but I still had some potatoes left over from last year, so I planted them in that seventh row.  Once I had them all planted, I discovered more potatoes stored under the house that still looked good, and instead of wasting them, I planted them too; two more rows.  That gave me nine rows of potatoes.

    It was an extremely dry year, so I figured that maybe the potatoes would suffer, but when I started digging them, I was surprised to find that, despite the drought, they the potatoes did better than usual.  That meant I was going to have way more potatoes than we needed.  Digging up the nine rows of potatoes was a big job, but since it was so dry, the potatoes came out fairly clean, without a lot of soil sticking to them.

    I always plant a variety of potatoes, and in the photo above you can see this year’s crop.  Some varieties had scabby skin, but that is not unusual in my garden, and scab is just cosmetic anyway, it doesn’t effect the taste or spoilage.

    I will check into giving part of my potatoes to the Food Bank, I sure don’t need this many.  I always look upon potatoes as insurance, in case of an emergency.  If things get really dire, we can always eat potatoes.  We store them in the unheated crawlspace under the house, which isn’t as great as a proper root cellar, but it gets the potatoes through the winter.

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