Almost too pretty to eat
It pained me to do it, but several bushy, volunteer potato plants had to be dug out of the ground to make way for planting beans. This was the result, an early harvest of beautiful baby potatoes. They were so pretty, it seemed a shame to eat them, but eat them we did. We took them to our friend Shelley’s house and she roasted them in the oven with some parsley and extra-virgin olive oil. Boy, were they tasty. Or maybe it was knowing they’d just been plucked from the soil that made them taste so good.
Here’s a warning about planting your own potatoes. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. We plant our “sets” around St. Patrick’s day. You can use potatoes from the store, if they’ve begun to sprout. But come harvest time, it’s almost impossible to guarantee you won’t leave a few little spudnicks in the ground, and the following year they will want to reproduce. That’s how we get all these “volunteer” potato plants growing in our vegetable beds where they aren’t wanted.
This year I got a delivery of so much compost I hardly knew what to do with it all, so I created a specail hill for potatoes about 15 feet long and planted it with potatoes that were sprouting in our pantry. Those plants are bushes now. I’m anxious to see what kind of crop they yield, but that won’t be until later in the summer.
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
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