Saturday, June 30, 2007

More Crops!

We harvested one of our potato plants today. This crop turned out much better than our ill-fated first attempt. We reaped 8 potatoes of moderate size, 2 small ones, and about 20 tiny ones, which made us wonder how many potatoes we could have gotten out of this plant. A normal harvest, according to our Burpee book, is 8-12 normal-sized potatoes, so we probably did fine. They're a little bit pink, and the potato we planted was red ... we aren't sure what that's all about.

This plant is about a month ahead of the rest of them, but the remaining plants took forever to sprout. We just learned that some potatoes from the grocery store are sprayed with a "growth inhibitor" to limit sprouting -- we think that's what happened with the laggards. We also found out there are actually special seed potatoes you can buy. Lesson learned for next time.

The latest crop of potatoes is now "curing" in the kitchen. We'll cook them up later this week.

At left, you can see the potatoes measured against a nickel for scale.

No comments: