Harvesting Potatoes

Over the weekend we spent an evening down in the garden digging up our potatoes. Since this was the first year that our potatoes did well, it was quite exciting to dig down in the dirt and find big and little potatoes just hanging out waiting for us to come along and harvest them.

We planted 2 types - russet and fingerling. I'm not sure the specifics other than that, as these were free potatoes brought in to my office by coworkers who had extra. Since we've had such crappy luck with potatoes the last 2 years (death by drowning then death by over burying the emerging plants), I didn't want to spring for the cost of seed potatoes, so there wasn't a spot for them in the garden. When I brought the spares from work home (in two batches), I just had to fit them into the garden wherever I thought there would be room, which turned out to be on either side of the peppers. One side getting likely not enough water, the other getting overgrown by tomatoes.

When we started digging, I was still somewhat amazed to find anything, just based on our previous lack of potato-luck.

The fingerlings were first, and although a lot were very tiny, there were some larger ones in there that will be great in my favorite roasted potato dish.

Little M had a lot of fun pointing out the newly uncovered potatoes and then taking them to the bowl for safekeeping.

Then we moved on to the russets. There weren't as many of these per plant, but what they lacked in numbers they more than made up in size - there were some monsters! Perfect for double baked potatoes :)

It will be so great to eat potatoes from our own garden in the coming weeks. Next year we will certainly be planting more so that we can enjoy them for longer into the winter months! Hopefully some day we will have room in our garden space to feed us these types of things year-round, but we just don't have enough space tilled up and fenced in yet.