Potatoes

When I first dug up potatoes in mid-july, I found quite a lot of them. Since I knew we wouldn't be able to use them all quickly, I decided to leave most in the ground, hoping that they would keep well there. They are a thin-skinned red kind and not meant for long-term storage. We've gotten several shares of potatoes from the CSA between then and now, so we had no need for more potatoes. We finally burned through the CSA potatoes, so I dug up a couple plants from the garden yesterday. Here is what the potatoes looked like.

Not too shabby. A couple of them are rather calloused, but nothing to complain about. They are certainly in a lot better shape than most things would be after being buried in dirt for two months! I'm sure that you avid Miller Homestead followers recall that I was considering whether to thin out my potato plants or just let them grow. I thinned one row to 2-3 stems per tuber, while leaving all the 4-6 stems per tuber in the other row. I harvested one plant from each row yesterday, and though its a small sample size, you can see the difference. The bottom pile is from the thinned row and produce fewer, larger potatoes, while the non-thinned row produced more, smaller potatoes. That matches up with what the internet told me to expect. There is slightly more weight in the non-thinned potatoes, but not by a lot. Its hard to tell from the pic, but those two larger ones weigh a lot. Next year, I'll probably try to plant with somewhat fewer eyes (each eye sprouts one or more stems) per chunk of potato, but I won't thin them at all.

Since I was too lazy to post a pic of the garden in my garden update post, here is one.

The picture doesn't show everything because its too cramped to be able to see it all without a fish-eye lens, but you get the idea. The remains of the spaghetti squash can be seen on the left side and right side (where I let it grow through the old potato patch). Zucchini in the front. Broccoli is the blueish leaves in the middle with tomatoes behind that. You can just see the Brussells Sprouts plants starting to grow in the back along the wall. Pepper plants in the back right.