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(Caution: Image Heavy) We all know what’s happened to the stock market over the past year. No news there. A whole lot of people lost a whole lot of their retirement and goodness knows what else over the past year. A whole lot of people are going to have to work long past their ‘sell by’ dates just to get through.
What Aunt Toby is here to tell you is that there are other ‘investments’ that sometimes do a whole lot better than fancy financial instruments, ‘regular’ and ‘preferred’ and Class A, B or C.
I’m talking about…potatoes(and yes, I realize that there has been a whole lot of coverage about this ‘early blight’ stuff that is basically turning tomatoes into the vegetable equivalent of cavier this summer – and is the same thing that killed a million Irish through starvation between 1845 and 1852 – and brought another million to our shores in the same time). And we have had a summer the likes of which I do not care to discuss (needless to say that if there are any leather shoes underneath Aunt Toby’s bed – they have already sprouted some rather exotic molds because it’s been one rainy summer Chez Siberia.
But remember these?
I’ve been watching that bed for a while because once potatoes flower, it’s time to keep a watch for the plants dying back. That means (drum roll, please) that it is time to dig them up.
I love digging up potatoes. It’s like Treasure Island and we are the pirate crew. The other part is that no matter how clever we think we are about getting every last one, we always miss a few. These turn into volunteers and usually, since they have had a head start from the fall before, we get even bigger ‘taters’ the next year. A nice surprise.
So, let’s review: In early March, I went to the Philadelphia Flower Show and I bought a little bag of seed potatoes – there were three little potatoes in that bag that weighed 8 ounces. A half a pound of potatoes that I cut into basically thirds (so that each one had a couple of eyes). The amount of ground that I used to plant them was a piece of a bed that was about 3 feet wide and 5 feet long. Frankly, those potatoes were not the only occupants – I had some basil plants hidden in there as well. Recently, the plants just seemed to give up the ghost.
And yesterday I dug them up. Frankly, I was expecting, between the rain and the whole ‘OMG – it’s the blight..the blight” thing, a slimy unedible mess that I’d have to dig the entire bed up and throw everything – potatoes, slime, dirt, rocks everything, away. Blight is a bacterial infection so I’d have to do that. But no – the bed (which the DH has worked assiduously for years, digging it out by hand, with a pick and shovel, de-rocking it, putting in manure and leaves and compost every year, was great – the dirt had drained well and the potatoes were just…lovely.
So, I dug them all out and I washed all the dirt off them and weighed them, just to see how much we’d gotten out of those three little potatoes..that 8 ounces had turned through the magic of being buried in the ground, given room, warmth, and rain, into…14 pounds.
FOURTEEN POUNDS.
You do the math:
14 pounds x 16 ounces to the pound = 224 ounces
224 ounces / 8 ounces is 28 — 28 times the investment
Let’s see now – if we invested a $1.00 today and 5 months later, we received $28.00 back, that would be SOME investment, huh? The difference between investing money and seed potatoes is that with a money investment, you can lose your whole investment. The chances of losing all of your potatoes are pretty small (small potatoes? Nah…). 
So, now we have 14 pounds of potatoes. Actually, we have a good bit less because they are soooo good that we have already eaten some. And some are really too small to eat. So, I’m going to invest them again – I’ll put those back in the ground for next year.
Worth the risk.
(this post is also found at you know, the other place…)
7 Comments
Freshly harvested potatoes –roasted and served with butter and parsley hmmmmm good
Another wonderful piece from Toby.
We are just starting the potato harvest in Sonoma County and are lucky to have dry farmed, organic potatoes available.
Nelsen Ranch near Tomales Bay 22 varieties of organic potatoes.
Seconded.
Recommended.
Toby, are you thinking Irish Potato famine here?
Where I am, it’s been hot as hades. The tomatoes don’t like it at all..my corn is fine with it as long as we get even a little rain to pollinate the ears..cucumbers growing well in the shade of the corn as are the eggplant…huge!
I planted more tomatoes so they didn’t get full sun all day and they are doing fine. I hope I get some before it freezes!
Potatoes are great, but the sow bugs ate them the last time I planted them. Beautiful plants aren’t they?
Hey, Toby. You make potato growing sound heavenly.
I’ve never tried potatoes, though I’m pretty sure that my paternal grandparents in WVa did; they had a huge (well, to a kid) garden with pretty much everything you’d expect from people who grew up on farms in the late 19th/early 20th century. And lots and lots of pole beans — I remember those because the classic tepee’d poles were always visible, even if the beans weren’t yet.
They always grew corn, and even my parents grew corn, in their smaller patch behind our first owned house. I had no idea how difficult corn could be to grow 40 years later, in the Texas sun. Corn always failed – we may have had too few.
Oh, and visited the Farmers Market today – yummmm PEACHES!!! Ate one as soon as I got home, sigh, lovely, sweet, juicy – a real peach.
Went a little nuts from a week’s deprivation (last week, was out of $$$); tomatoes, green beans, tomatillos (tiny – have never seen them so small. Salsa coming up), zucchini, of course.
And I asked the young vendor if she ever brought zucchini blossoms, and she said her mother did, who comes to the larger market on Saturday. If she has them, she brings them, she said. Yay!
The Irish Potato Famine – although the proximate cause was the potato blight, the foundation cause was the enthusiastic establishment all over Europe in the 18th Century of the potato as a cheap filling foodstuff for peasants. It is thought that the potato entered Europe by way of the Spanish who brought them back after entering Peru in 1532. By 1800, in many parts of Europe, including Ireland, Scotland and Britain, the white potato was firmly established as the dominant foodstuff for the peasantry. “Potatoes contain nutrients, such as protein, carbohydrate, and
vitamin C, which are necessary for a healthy diet, but lack vitamin
A and calcium. Combined with milk, potatoes supply almost all food
elements required for a healthy diet.(13) To fulfill the daily
nutritive requirement in the mid-1800s, each person had to eat 3
kilograms (six and a half pounds) of potatoes. According to
historical accounts, a “burley farmer could down 15 potatoes” at
one meal.” http://www1.american.edu/TED/potato.htm
Needless to say, with crop failures, people starved.
Great yield, and I’m envious. Up here, we coped with late blight from tomatoes sold in big box stores. But are you sure it’s “early blight” or late blight that caused the Irish potato famine?
Well, all the coverage I read claimed that this year’s blight was the same thing as what caused the Irish potato famine. Frankly, bacteria are all over the place in the soil in a garden – all they need are the proper conditions to take off – and those are a lot of wet conditions and the right temperatures. So, late blight or early blight, it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference.