Potatoes Galore!

(L - the waxy white, firm Coliban - R - the creamier, softer Dutch Cream

I tried a few different varieties of potato this season. White - Dutch Cream, Coliban, Pontiac, Nicola and Sebago; Pink - Desiree. A friend gave me some seed potatoes. I have to say after a few seasons now, the Dutch Creams are still my favourite and their flavour changes even with storage time. Fresh out of the garden and into a potato salad or steamed - they are to die for! You cannot get that rich creamy flavour from the shop-bought ones. The home-grown Desirees were pretty yummy too!



We had literally buckets of them and I weighed them to collect some of my stats :)
We lost a few (mostly Dutch Cream) due to very heavy prolonged rain and reduced drainage ( due to clay soil - still!). They rotted in the ground - bummer. Probably lost at least a kilo :(

Still, I planted 12 potatoes, most of them cut into pieces and got a total yield of just over 21kg! At say only $3 a kilo for pesticide-free home-grown delicious potatoes, that's $63 worth! The Sebago had an astonishing yield - one seed potato of about 100g (cut into pieces) yielded 5.85 kilos of potatoes. That's nearly a 59x yield by weight!



I laid them out in a dark room to let them dry out a bit after all that rain. I had many more potatoes than shown in this picture. We are still eating them now (4 months later) and had potato and pumpkin mash using our home-grown pumpkins for dinner tonight. YUM!

Potayto Potahto

It was worth growing veggies for a year just to see the joyous look on S's face as she pulled potatoes out of the patch like a child finding Easter eggs! The harvest of potatoes this way is amusingly called "Bandicooting" in honour of the digging habit of the little Aussie bandicoot.

The treasure:

I think (!) I planted Nicola, Desiree and definitely Dutch Cream potatoes.

The treasure chest:

This was from light digging alone. I have not dug up the whole patch yet. I can't quite bring myself to do it and yet, some potatoes are so ready, they are beginning to sprout new plants! Even so, we have already harvested nearly 10kg!

And the taste test? Potatoes steamed lightly with a dash of butter and salt - ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS! The wierd thing is I am getting tastes that I remember as a kid. Just goes to show you how bland a lot of produce has become with hybridisation, long-term refrigerated storage, etc. - even within one generation.

So why aren't Dutch Cream potatoes grown en mass? Is it because of less yield? Poor storage? It puzzles me. These potatoes are so yummy that I literally can't stop eating them every time a batch is cooked.

Plus they are so easy to grow. I just made sure the soil was heaped up and straw added on the top and sides of the potato patch to keep the light out so they don't go green. I didn't even bother watering them that much aside from the rain. I did put some chicken poo on the patch as an experiment and this was probably the result :) :

But all-in-all fun to grow and great to eat ... and arrange into patterns :-)