It's tater time!

Image by jephremley via Flickr

Check it out - we've got taters!

So while we were back at my folks last Thanksgiving or Christmas, my mom had picked up a small bag of mixed-color fingerling potatoes, and I told her she should consider having dad plant some in their garden. I know dad doesn't normally grow potatoes, and I realize it's normally cheaper and more efficient to just buy them at the store, but thought it could be fun.

Instead she sent the potatoes home with me for my garden. Now sure, I'd gone through the same thing last summer where, after digging up whatever potatoes I've planted, I swore off ever planting them again. They take up a lot of space over a long period of time, and then you really don't get THAT many. So I wasn't going to grow potatoes again this year! (Plus there were the additional complications with potatoes being additional vectors for the late blight that killed off all my tomatoes last summer!).

And yet here I had these cute little red, blue and yellow fingerling potatoes - how could I refuse?

So this spring when I was out there tucking in other plants, I made space for the potatoes that I'd intentionally sprouted by leaving out in the sunshine...and then Tucker took an instant liking to the trenches where I'd just planted the taters.

Image by jephremley via Flickr

So this past week, just before the rainstorms hit, I'd decided the potatoes had been there long enough. I'd seen signs of blooms on the plants (which can be an indicator that they're ready to be dug up) - I didn't let them get to the point where the plants were actually dying back (that's DEFINITELY a sign they're ready!), but I wanted to free up the space for other stuff, and to also open up the airflow since the rest of the bed was the eggplants and okra I really wanted to coddle.

There were a number of really odd things about these potatoes. When you buy the bag of mixed colors, they're all basically the same size. But since they're three different varieties, they also had some very different traits.

The blue potatoes really didn't produce very many potatoes per plant, nor did they get very big - they were still tiny little things. They were your more traditional potato shape - just small. (I've grown Russian fingerlings before that are much longer/narrower - definitely fingerlings...)

The red potatoes, on the other hand, had gotten quite bit - a couple were getting close to the size of a baking potato! They have an odd shape as well - instead of being super plump and round, many of them have slightly more scalloped contours, where they have parts that stick out a little more (perhaps where the eyes are?) and then they cave in a bit between the eyes.

Image by jephremley via Flickr

And the yellow ones? WEEEEEIRD! Check out the pictures to see what I mean. It's like each potato had little side potatoes growing off've it...and those had rosey-colored tips on them. It's almost like they're growing wings or nipples or something. Bizarre. Of the three varieties, and if you pretend there aren't any "potato nipples" involved, these were the most fingerling-like...

And how to they taste? Well, I probably only dug up 2-3 pounds of potatoes at most (and that's ALL the potatoes I grew), but they're sure tasty. I roasted them, along with other veggies fresh from the garden, with a Chicken Thistle Farm chicken the other night, and booooy were they good! I'll cover more on that later (even though I didn't take any pictures of the meal - I wish I would've!).

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