Field Boss

My mother is the queen of lists. The Things I Get To Do Today when I'm visiting her frequently gets longer by the hour. The reasons for that are perfectly okay. She's nearly ninety two. The fact that she is not physically able to do all the work but can make a list for me to do what she wishes she could is okay, too. I'm grateful to be of assistance to her.

Today we planted potatoes and carrots. Her instructions were: use the post hole digger to make the hole for the seed potato, put in the sprouted potato being careful to protect the tender sprouts, add a tablespoon of potash, cover with soil making a little mound so she could see where each hill of potatoes would spring forth in a couple of weeks.

She apologized for being bossy. I knew she was just talking out loud as she "saw" herself doing the planting as she had done for the last eighty five years. "Naw," I said, "you're just being a good field boss."

Potato Gets Naked

Naked Potato

It was a strip with no tease.  A sudden, muffled pumpfff came from the corner of the kitchen.  Investigation revealed the maker of the noise.  Just a  potato getting undressed.




Perhaps it was the potato's way of telling me it didn't want to be cooked in the microwave.  I should have known better.  Not too hard to guess what cleaning Things I get to do today!  

Fruits of Neglect

Potato vines have all died back.  Only a green weed remains.

It ain't true.  You don't have to work hard to have a garden.  My potatoes are proof. Sitting on my laurels (on the ground) next to this neglected patch of earth, I chuckled to myself, and the hens chuck-chuckled, too.

Rake back the straw!

One Lazy Farmer here, on a day last spring when she had plenty of Things I get to do today already lined up, threw a pile of old alfalfa into a bed of earth.  She came back in a few minutes, made little holes in the hay, and tucked in sprouted potato chunks.

Lazy Farmer's yield from one plant

That was the end of the "work."  Five months of total neglect later, the Lazy Farmer scratches in the hay, looking for treasures in red and gold.  Eureka! Twenty five plus pounds of lazy potatoes lay snuggled in the beds.

ps.  Since harvest day, the hens have spent nearly every waking hour going through these beds with beak and claw to remove all bugs who thought they'd found a sweet home.  The Lazy Farmer, she smiles.

Chicken Beetles

They got my potatoes!  Beetles have been eating great gobs of the leaves leaving only the spine and the stalk. They made a swath two-plants wide through the middle of the potato patch.  No other vines were affected.  The selectiveness puzzled me.

Damage from Chicken Beetles

Being observant is always one of the Things I get to do today.  So I observed. This "infestation" occurred suddenly after allowing the chickens to roam about in part of their "gated community" where the berry vines and the potatoes flourish. When the potatoes vines were small and tender, no chickens were allowed.  I did reason that once the plants were twice as tall as the shortest chicken, the vines would be safe.

Who?  Me?

Closer observation:  1) open gate to berries and potatoes, 2) chickens run in to browse, 3) hens wander, scratch and peck about in a poultry fashion, 4) Katy Perry Chicken goes straight to the center of the spindly potatoes, 5) Katy Perry Chicken plucks vigorously at the naked vines, 6) potatoes vines must not be poisonous to chickens, 7) Chicken "beetles" are harmful to potatoes.

Conclusion:  Katy Perry Chicken is not allowed visiting privileges in that special corner until I've protected the plants from Chicken Beetles.

Potato Pro, Raspberry Pro

I'm not tooting my own horn here.  I'm not a professional anything.  This is all about keeping things safe.  We've talked about garden pro not that long ago when the girls were still on the loose in the yard and when the squirrels were digging me an opportunity to plant onions twice.

Keeping busy feet at bay

Big-hearted chicken lover that I am, I suffer a twinge (is it guilt?) when the hens do not have full free range of all our property.  Well, not the front yard--there's no fence there.  So recently my extra tomato cages became potato pro(tection).   Two by two lumber from an old bean trellis found itself in the Things I get to do today to hinder the frenzied feet of the girls at the base of my raspberry rows.

Cages just laid on the bed--spaces too open and vulnerable

But back to the tomato cages.  I'm very opinionated on this subject, I'll warn you up front.  The round wire funnel cages, in my opinion, are nothing short of a nuisance, especially in the off season.  My preference is the kind that are about three and a half feet tall and 14 inches square.  At the end of the season, they fold flat.  15 of them take not space at all, it seems.  But even this kind can be worthless if they are made cheaply with light-weight wire.  A good wind will take them and your tomatoes right over like a pile of angry coat hangers in a wrestling match.

Cages opened, linked and offset with 6-7" openings.

Somehow I acquired half a dozen or so of this cheapo kind.  And when the potatoes needed help these worthless wires were shanghaied into service.  I unlinked the hooks that made them square, creating a flat open mesh, then linked half of them all together to cover the long bed.  Did the same with the rest and laid them offset so that the "mesh" has about 6" openings in instead of 12".


There's a use for everything if you let your creativity ramble about in the vicinity of an idea that's looking for an answer.

A Brine Solution

I love goat cheese.  The recipe sounded yummy.   It came from a fancy-pants cookbook.  In spite of the good beginning, resulting dish was hard to eat:  flavor toward the bland side, but mostly it was dry on the palette.

We had "Sautéed Potatoes and Mushrooms with Goat Cheese" for dinner.  Button mushrooms quartered and sautéed in butter and olive oil until golden with minced garlic added at the last minute is how the recipe began.  That's what drew me in, that and the fact that I had goat cheese in the fridge.

Now figuring out how to make the leftovers a delight instead of a struggle is on my supper Things I get to do today.  A to-die-for compote of baked red grapes and kalamata olives served with goat cheese on crackers comes to mind.  The answer is there.

Dilute the brine to keep it from being too salty.

A few minutes later we have "gravy", or maybe better said, "sauce" made from a butter/flour roux with a pinch of thyme and some kalamata olive brine ready to rescue the potatoes.   Magnifique!

One Potato, Two Potato

Potatoes are cheap.  "Small potatoes" means "not much."  We would not hesitate to toss them out, especially if they look like they're 90-year-old potato heads with all sprouts and no teeth.

I don't know beans about what makes a seed potato.  Last spring I was gifted with a generous handful of them.  When I went to purchase more at my local farm store, I was curious about what process was used to create a "seed" potato.  The fellow who helped my was more in the dark than I.  I went away wondering if it was all just a hoax.  If any of you readers want to comment with enlightening information on this subject, I'll certainly read it.

My technique for creating seed potatoes is to gather whatever is in the vegetable bin that has sprouted and plant it.  I've read that that doesn't work--that once it has long, white tendril sprouts, it won't grow a potato.  Maybe for others it doesn't.  But my mother, grandmother and great-grandmother did it.  So I wasn't shy about telling my daughter last summer that she could plant those ugly, sprouted knobs and something would come of it.  We tilled up a nice chunk of her lawn, piled on  the compost she had been cooking for a year and mixed it in.  Even with only first-time-potato-planting skills, she looked like a pro.

Part of the harvest

The rest was left to the potatoes to do what they naturally do when covered by earth and giving a little water from time to time.  They grew. They blossomed.   And toward fall the frost took the tops down.  Since they were planted rather late in the season (middle of July), there was some question about whether or not they would "potato."  Fruits have to mature and ripen.  Tubors just grow.  It's not a question of green or ripe.  But had there been enough time for them to tubor?

A crisp, fall day was the moment when the mystery of the earth would be revealed.  Digging potatoes is a treasure hunt and magic show all wrapped into one.   Putting ones shovel into the earth and exposing shiny, ruby-colored food is definitely magic.  I heard by phone it was a great show.

Awesome potatoes

So now this cold, wintery evening months later, we are thinking about supper and comfort food.   The breath-taking surprise for me from the larder was this generous bag of brilliant red potatoes. "Stand in awe of potato magic" is one of the Things I get to do today.  Our stew tonight has its origins in the roots of the dried up, sprouted dregs of routine grocery shopping from last summer.  ...three potato, four.  Five potato, six potato, seven potato more.