Freshly dug home grown potatoes taste better than any spuds you can buy. Fresh from the ground, potatoes are downright juicy, their crunchy flesh cloaked inside filmy skins as delicate as silk. Compared to the store-bought version, home grown potatoes are so exquisite that they are almost like a different vegetable.
We grow two or three potato varieties every year, and I usually replant some of my saved spuds. But following 2009’s late blight epidemic, I decided to start anew this season. In addition to planting proper seed potatoes of good old Kennebec and Red LaSoda, I did what I often do – planted a collection of sprouting gourmet potatoes from the store.
I didn’t keep track of which varieties went where, because the blossoms that come on in June will reflect the skin colors of the tubers below – tan-skinned potatoes generally have white blossoms, red-skinned varieties have pink blossoms, and the blue-skinned potato blossoms are lavender-blue. Fingerling potatoes rarely bloom in my garden, but they can be picked out by their narrow leaves.
A week or two after the blossoms appear, I become a thief of new potatoes. Any small potato may be labeled a “new” potato at the store, but true new potatoes are gathered from plants that are still in full leaf. These little spuds seem to want to be gathered from the way they pop up right at the soil’s surface, where it’s cool and dark thanks to 3 inches of mulch. Scrunched down on the ground, I forage for the noobs, gently twist them off, and replace the mulch. The parent plants never know they’re missing.
Potatoes gain nutrition as they mature, and you will get more potatoes by waiting for the plants to die back before gathering your spuds. Store extras in a cool place, or even a deep hole dug in the ground. In warm climates where few houses have cool basements, this is often the best way to store bumper crops of home grown potatoes.
