Urban Potato Harvest
July 5th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Posted in garden
Potatoes freshly dug from our front-yard kitchen garden
It’s not every day you see potatoes being pulled from the ground in the middle of the city. Since our garden is in the front yard (no back yard here), people stopped on the sidewalk to watch and ask questions and simply marvel at food happening within spitting distance of a busy thoroughfare, about a mile from the White House here in the District of Columbia.
We harvested about 30 pounds of big Yukon Gold potatoes, and some purple spuds that somehow worked their way into our seed order. Since we are no longer eating starchy carbohydrates, we are making gifts of these to friends and neighbors. But just when I thought our days as urban potato farmers were over, my wife opines that we should continue planting them next year so we can give them away.
Greedy me. I now see an entire vegetable bed where the potatoes used to be begging to be planted with something new. I don’t have any particular plan. Bush beans sounds right. I love being the opportunistic gardener.
Bush beans are my go-to filler crop for any empty space, so, good choice. In 50-60 days you can even do it again! And the choice is really wide.
You could also do soybeans (edamame).
We’ve been grabbling spuds in our beds lately too. Nothing like a new potato! Sorry Ed. I just love them, especially now, steamed and slathered in a ton of butter. We’re going to be cutting way down on bread products over the coming year and spuds will be our main starch crop.
El, if I were still eating potatoes, that’s exactly how I’d eat them–slathered in a ton of butter, maybe next to some nice sausage or a choucroute with some of our homemade sauerkraut. We also had planned on making potatoes and sweet potatoes a big part of our diet. They provide a ton of calories, compared to most of the other vegetables we grow. We’ve stumbled onto green beans as a prolific filler crop. They need to be planted often, and incredibly good fresh. We particularly like the flat Italian varities.
Mmm.. potatoes. You have some lucky friends and neighbors, Ed! You always have such terrific harvests come out of your garden,–and I enjoy reading about them.
How do you recommend storing those potatoes (or how did you store them in the past when you kept them for yourselves?) We’re anticipating quite a few to harvest later in the summer, as we planted 21 hills of Yukon Golds (albeit a bit tardily)…and would appreciate storage advice!
Sparow, storage is an issue for us in the District of Columbia. It’s pretty hot this time of year and we don’t have a basement we can use. A proper root cellar would be the best place. We just look for the coolest, darkest place in the house, which usually is the stairwell down to the garage.