Photo by Jessica Walliser I plant a variety of blue, red and yellow potatoes and always reap a large harvest. |
I spent yesterday morning digging potatoes. There’s probably no more rewarding garden task this time of year. It’s such a treat to pry up the pitch fork and have a bunch of fist-sized spuds pop up out of the earth. In late April, I planted 10 pounds of seed potatoes and dug up about eight times that yesterday. It never fails to amaze me what a good, consistent producer potatoes always are—even when I am a neglectful gardener.
This year, I planted all my favorites, including the gorgeous dark-purple heirloom known as All Blue, a red-skinned potato with creamy-yellow flesh called Rose Gold, the butter-yellow-colored Yukon Gold, and my favorite standby, high-yielding Kennebec. All produced fairly well this year, with Kennebec being the standout yet again.
I have grown several varieties of fingerling potatoes in the past, but I never got around to planting any this year. Fingerlings never seem to produce as much as I’d like, and though they were always a good seller at the farmers’ market, they are not favorites in my own kitchen. I like larger potatoes for mashing and frying because they’re easier to peel. I use mostly new potatoes early in the season for roasting. I do like the fingerlings for roasting, but I don’t always want to dedicate the garden space to them when they never seem to yield as many tubers as I’d like.
So now that they’re dug, my spuds are sitting in the garage on a layer of cardboard to cure for a few days before I brush them off, pack them into boxes and tuck them into the basement for storage. I’m already looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner!
