Skip to main content

Potato Disappointment, Year 3

floppy side door potatoesSo a few weeks ago, one of the hanging grocery potato bags flowered, and then the vines got very long and drooped.

So I waited, and the vines got droopier, and finally, on Friday, I thought, “there must be some potatoes there by now.”

Well, there were.  Some.  Maybe six?

Not counting a few little pebble-sized spuds, here’s what I got from the entire bag.  Nice foliage… almost zilch underground.  :-o

 DSC04273 DSC04279

The cucumber (in the right-hand picture) was disappointing also.  I was lazy and didn’t check which type it was (marketmore or Straight 8) but it was unpleasantly bitter.  I was surprised, because the cucumbers we’ve had from the garden in past were always way sweeter than supermarket ones.

farmday 030 Two explanations I thought of:  despite the fact that the cuke was growing in a self-watering hanging planter, I was perhaps a bit inconsistent about water.  AND I guess I didn’t really wait for the cuke to ripen fully.

BUT I don’t think those could be the main reason.  Because I have watered inconsistently before and still gotten cukes.  When there’s too little water, they just fall off, they don’t ripen nicely and look as cute as this one does!  And even when I harvest them underripe, they usually taste okay.  I mean, what are pickles, if not underripe cucumbers?  (hmm… or are they dwarf cucumbers?)

I am consoling myself by thinking that cucumbers are (I think!) native to the middle east and would probably grow happily in a self-watering planter, even on a balcony, in Israel.

DSC04276To top off all this disappointment, here’s the yuck part about growing potatoes.  You’d think the original “seed” potato would somehow manage to tastefully disintegrate into the soil:  ashes to ashes, etc. 

Maybe sometimes it does, but mine usually just hang about turning to MUSH.  They wrinkle, they shrivel, but inside, they remain, essentially, liquified potato.

How do I know?

Because each year, I manage to plunge at least one finger straight into the heart of one in my desperate attempts to find nice, fresh, yummy new potatoes.

Somehow, I will put all this disappointment behind me.

I still have quite a few more cucumbers coming, plus one hanging grocery bag and two buckets full of potatoes, which are maybe doing something a little more than this grocery bag did.  Hey, maybe I’ll complain to the President’s Choice people!

Oh – the big plus of the hanging-bag planter is that it WAS indeed easy to empty (just dump it out somewhere you want a bunch of compost!).  And then it was super-easy to sift through the compost for new potatoes.  Maybe it would have been easier if there were more than SIX potatoes in the entire thing. 

Drat.  Perhaps I am doomed to never harvest a satisfying quantity of delicious homegrown potatoes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po

It's Heart Month: 3 days left to save lives!

Dear Friends & Family: Hi, everybody! Sorry I can’t stop by in person... you're a bit out of my area.  :-) We’re out walking up and down on our street on this beautiful afternoon to raise money for Heart & Stroke.  This cause is important to me (I won't say it's close to my heart , because that would be tacky!).  I hope you'll join me by donating online. Growing up, I watched as every single one of my grandparents' lives were shortened by heart disease and strokes, and my father had a defibrillator that saved his life on more than one occasion.  Heart disease and stroke kill 1 in 3 Canadians and are the #1 killer of women. Please click this link to be redirected to my main page at the Heart & Stroke website: http://tinyurl.com/AtlasHeart Thus ends my personal appeal.  Official information follows.  :-))) ----- Heart disease and stroke is the #1 killer of women - taking more women's lives than all forms of cancer combined. But no one is immune. Th