Saturday, February 27, 2010

Potatoes

I am alive.....just lazy. If it makes a difference,
I've been neglecting the garden as well as the blog :)


So, this week I will do a little garden tour to kind of catch up on what's been going on here in our California zone 9 garden....starting with the potatoes.

The furrows were pretty weedie, but the plants were big enough to start covering the lower parts...or hilling up. This is done to prevent growing potatoes from peeking out from under the dirt and turning green and toxic. Potatoes grow up from the original tuber and by hilling up around the plants, you give them more dirt to grow in (make sense?)

Guess I should've brought a ruler to show scale:)

Not sure why there is such a difference in the size of the plants.

As I was weeding I did unearth a marble size potato on one of the smallest plants (still attached, which is why I covered it back up and didn't get a photo) so I know they are growing down there.


The joy of potatoes is when you dig them up in the spring, obviously; we all know that harvesting veggies is the fun part. But with potatoes there's that element of surprise as well. There's just something magical about finding these edible goodies underneath all that greenery.