Mommy! It’s a Potato!

The day has come.  It’s time to dig up one of our favorite garden surprise – the potatoes! OOOOH, it’s so exciting to brush mounds of dirt off the potatoes and delicately start to dig! Will we dig up 1 potato? 10? 100? 

This year our potatoes were really special to me. 

⁣⁣Enceladus is in the garden a lot with us, but the potatoes are extra special because we grew them together. On a Saturday morning in early June, we kneeled side by side in the dirt. I dug holes and Enceladus placed each potato in the hole. Then she helped me push dirt on top of each and give them a pat. “We planted potatoes!” she yelled.

Every visit to the garden this Summer, she would point to the potatoes and say “Mommy and Celly planted the potatoes!”. It became our thing at the garden. We took care of the other plants, composted, ate strawberries, and we always checked the potatoes. ⁣⁣
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Finally this past weekend we dug up the potatoes. 30 pounds of Yukon and red potatoes. Enceladus was so excited when we dug and spotted the first one. “POTATOES!! MOMMY! IT’S A POTATO!” Heart melt. Then we kept digging. And kept finding more potatoes. She was so happy. I was too, I love potatoes.⁣⁣

I think she looked pretty happy with our potato harvest, don’t you? (btw, totally framing this picture!)

Last night we had roasted potatoes for dinner. I told her they were the potatoes she grew in the garden. She declared they were “really yummy!”.⁣⁣  I’m so happy that we get to live in NYC, but with some dirt, water and lots of hard work, we can grow our own food together as a family. It makes vegetable eating a little bit more special for this city kid.

Overall, it was a good potato harvest in the garden this year.    If you remember last year we planted potatoes Upstate and did nothing.  This year wasn’t as easy, as growing in the city always has it’s hurdles.

The big hurdle this year was covering the potatoes and continuing to mound them throughout the season.  Unlike Upstate, where we can just dig up some dirt to mound, in the city we can’t exactly dig up the ground as easily (I’ll get arrested – hah).  We could buy bags of soil, but we didn’t really want to spend a whole lot of money to grow potatoes (that defeats the point).   Not to mention, we’d have to lug these bags of soil to the garden – no fun.

What we did come up with was using composted leaves to cover the potatoes, along with dirt that we could find.  This worked ok, although when we watered or it rained our mounds significantly got smaller.   In a perfect world, we would have had a little more dirt for our mounds, but we used what we had to make it work. 

And now with a few bags of potatoes in our apartment, it’s time to break out our favorite potato recipes.  Potato Kale Salad, Cheesy Scalloped Potatoes, Cheeseburger Soup, Slow Cooker Kielbasa with Potatoes – gimme all the potatoes! Is there anything better in Fall then a warm bowl of potatoes?

Hope you liked our potato growing adventure!  We sure had lots of fun together.  I think you’ll see this little potato growing more potatoes in the future!

 

Update: Check out Potato Harvest 2020!