Potato Passion

Potatoes are one of the most fun things to harvest in my humble opinion. Last week, we visited a garden where one woman harvested her own and so I had the delightful duty of digging for some buried treasures she might have missed... found some lovely little gems too. Maybe not everyone finds this as exciting for me but I never really grew out of that childhood love of dirt. Having dug for worms with my dad and uncle every time they wanted to go fishing instilled an attachment to dirt under my fingernails and the joy of flinging it around until it's in my hair, smeared on my face, and coating my hands....

All nostalgia aside, potatoes harvest time is another one that might be a little difficult to discern. If you are looking for "new potatoes," or those little sweeties that are still full of sugar not yet turned to starch, then you have to dig them up while the plant is still happy and green. When the plants have started to die back you can find starchy, mature potatoes. If you want to wait a bit longer, they can still be harvested when the plants are falling over, and you can be sure the potatoes will be big and heavy with starchy goodness. Sometimes you might see them poking their faces out of the soil but it is best to cover them to protect them from the sun which turns them a greenish color, making that part bitter and possibly harmful. Green in this case does not mean go- it is a warning of the presence of solanine, a toxic substance most concentrated in the skin, so cutting away the green part will remove enough of the toxicity to make it fine for eating.

Ready to harvest potato plants

Someday I will definitely be growing my own potatoes; they are relatively easy to maintain and produce quite a bit (one plant = 3-4 pounds of potatoes!) and there are so many beautiful varieties to explore. Not only do I enjoy harvesting them most, but I enjoy buying them most of anything at the farmers market as well... the potato man has blue ones, purple ones, yellow ones, pink ones, roasters, mashers, long ones, fat ones, anything I could ever desire in a potato. All this passionate talk of potatoes is making me want some... or maybe that's just the Irish in me.