Friday, August 31, 2012

Early Harvest Surprise!!

My compost has two stages - working and finished.  In the "finished" side I threw some old organic potatoes in earlier this spring.  They sprouted into thriving plants and I added some dry leaves to help keep the moisture in.  I never "hilled" them like you are supposed to with potatoes because they were too many plants too close together.  I never watered them either.  They got rained on and got some sun and were pretty much left to figure it out on their own.  Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I needed to work on the side yard to prepare for the installation of the fence and that meant moving my compost.  While moving it, I noticed a few new potatoes.  I dug deeper and found more!!
(tilt your head again)
Here are a few of the plants pulled back and a couple of new 'taters!!
Look at that lush black soil!

I also found a gaint worm! 
Maybe not exciting to most people, but considering our poor soil quality and that I have been adding small worms to my compost for a couple years it was exciting to find one so big.

So many new potatoes!

A whopping 7 1/2 pounds!!
 
Not a bad surprise to be harvested this time of year.  A few of them got skewed by the first strike of the pitchfork and got returned to the "working" compost, but I am setting the rest of them out to dry. 
 
Guess what's for dinner?!

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