In preparation for our first day of Green Chillis this year, I was digging through the old card catalog drawers that we use for storing seeds. I nonchalantly opened one labeled "potatoes," and nearly leapt back in surprise, as a myriad of purple tentacles reached out of the dark recesses of the drawer! Though I hadn't noticed until then, they had even worked their way through and were peeking out of other spaces between the drawers above. This, my friends, is apparently what happens when you store your seed potatoes saved from last year in too warm an environment. As I learned afterwards, it's best to store them in the refrigerator. I wish I had thought to take a picture of them in the drawer! What follows is a log of our blue potato experimentation. We'll see what happens.
The day I found them, it was still way too cold for planting them out, so we decided to try a variety of things to keep them from using up all their energy and petering out before getting in the ground. For most of them, we broke off the long tendrils, leaving little stubs, and put them in a plastic bag in the fridge, hoping to slow them down again until we could plant them outside. The tendrils we put in a jar to see what they would do. The four other little spuds you see below, we planted in a pot.
The day I found them, it was still way too cold for planting them out, so we decided to try a variety of things to keep them from using up all their energy and petering out before getting in the ground. For most of them, we broke off the long tendrils, leaving little stubs, and put them in a plastic bag in the fridge, hoping to slow them down again until we could plant them outside. The tendrils we put in a jar to see what they would do. The four other little spuds you see below, we planted in a pot.
We planted the potatoes from the fridge and the rooted shoots out in the garden on April 3. Awhile later, we planted out the potatoes we potted, which had grown enormous! Over the summer, both groups sprouted and grew, thought the rooted shoots and potatoes from the fridge took a while to establish (in fact, I'm not sure how many of the successful plants were from the shoots and which from the fridge).
At last, it was time to harvest! We thoroughly dug through the patch where we'd planted the shoots and the refrigerated taters, and found only a few stunted tubers. Strangely, some of them looked exactly like rough-textured rocks, and we could only tell they were potatoes when we broke them and the interior was brilliant purple! A week or two later, we harvested the potatoes we had transplanted from the pot, and had more success. For some reason, this variety of potato has a tendency to form a small potato attached to the end of a larger one, resulting in several that looked like little people (or babies, or mummies). Below is the entire (rather scanty) harvest:
At last, it was time to harvest! We thoroughly dug through the patch where we'd planted the shoots and the refrigerated taters, and found only a few stunted tubers. Strangely, some of them looked exactly like rough-textured rocks, and we could only tell they were potatoes when we broke them and the interior was brilliant purple! A week or two later, we harvested the potatoes we had transplanted from the pot, and had more success. For some reason, this variety of potato has a tendency to form a small potato attached to the end of a larger one, resulting in several that looked like little people (or babies, or mummies). Below is the entire (rather scanty) harvest:
Scant or otherwise, we were determined to enjoy them! So on a mid-August afternoon, we harvested and minced chives and thyme, diced our spuds, minced a head of garlic we harvested earlier this summer, tossed everything with a generous slosh of olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and roasted them until they were crispy and delicious! Tastes were shared with library staff, and the kitchen smelled amazing.
Conclusion to this season-long experiment: Best to not forget your potatoes in a drawer until they get all shrively. But not all was lost! We enjoyed our bowl of really really yummy taters.