‘Taters Gone Wild: 2 Bushels and Counting

Reader Contribution by Blythe Pelham
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I spent 3 hours digging potatoes and two hours washing them this past weekend. So far, my experiment of planting the wildly exuberant potato volunteers in my basement has proven to be a success — especially since we now have fresh tubers to eat when I hadn’t planned on growing any this year at all. If you need a reminder about the beginning of this experiment, you can read this blog from April and this one from June.

I could have let some of this year’s crop sit longer in the ground, but our weather has been so hot and humid I figured they would probably last longer in my basement. Rather than continuing to tempt fate with them in the ground, I took advantage of a respite in the weather and dug away. The photo above is actually from two different harvests. I collected the Yukons a couple of weeks ago. There may still be a few of each of these varieties in the ground, but I won’t know until I dig the other two varieties still growing.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I adore the Christmas morning pleasure of digging my taters. I never know what I’ll find until I play in the soil. Finding each and every potato feels like discovering a gold nugget. Taken all together, the cumulative collection is truly a treasure that keeps filling our bellies and triggering my creative mind in the kitchen.

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