Potatoe Blossoms |
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| How About Those Potatoes July 29, 2007 10:23:57 I dug a row of potatoes a couple of days ago and am very happy with the way they turned out this year. Of course there are potatoes of all sizes but there are a lot of nice baking potatoes in each hill. When it is dry the potatoes come out of the ground almost clean. It is dry here. We have not had a good rain for about 3 weeks. When the soil gets warm it dries out quickly so we are starting to get dried out. Even these potatoes that have a paper and straw mulch are sitting in soil that is nearly dried out. The results of about 7 hills yielded a very nice bunch of potatoes of all sizes. We have had some baked and some steamed. Some of the potatoes are so big they can only be used by cutting them up and cooking them or it would take 1 1/2 to 2 hours to bake them in a conventional oven. We do not have a microwave to nuke stuff. The accompanying pic was the results of the 7 hills. That is a washtub not a small bucket.  I will just rub off any extra dirt that is still stuck on them and put them in a cardboard box inside the house somewhere where it is relatively cool. It is important that no light be allowed to reach the stored potatoes or they will turn green and ruin them. If they turn green they are inedible.
I guess everyone knows every part of the potatoe plant is poisonous except the potatoes. If your potatoes put out sprouts during storage the sprouts are not edible. Sometimes when digging potatoes there will be some individual ones that have been exposed to the sun and turned green on one side. I just leave those. They are not much good when they get like that. If you have a nice cool basement, which I do not have, that is the place to put the potatoes. Keep them dry and cool and they will last for months. We usually divide them up between several small boxes so if one goes bad, which will happen over time, it does not spoil a big bunch of potatoes. When I was in high school I stated working a grocery store. My first day on the job I had to sort out the rotten tomatoes in the store room in back. Rotten tomtatoes have quite an odor but not as bad a rotten onions. Comment on this article |