A Potato Shaped Like Jesus

Every spring we find a bin of sprouted potatoes in the pantry, and every spring we find a place in the garden, dig a trench, cut the potatoes into pieces, each with its own sprout and throw them into the ground.

This year we put them next to the asparagus, where last year the beans got tromped by the dogs racing back and forth along the fence barking at Monk and Mordecai, the large black dogs next door. This spring I got tired of all the barking and added a rabbit wire fence in front of the beds that border the back yard. The dogs stopped racing back and forth, the barking stopped, I had peace all summer. Yea!

I'm sure the nitrogen fixed by last years' crop, as well as the two years' worth of compost I pulled out of the bin and piled on top of the row, helped. Ann kept the little space weeded and when the potatoes had formed plants and started to bloom, she put newspapers covered with grass clippings around them to keep weeds out.

Then we forgot about them.

Our garden isn't very good, and we have problems growing many things to maturity because we have numbers of giant trees along the back lot line, which is the south. It shades our gardens and keeps crops (an optimistic term!) from growing as well as we'd like. On the other hand, our yard is very pleasant, and with the recent rain (more in the next paragraph), very green.

Anyway, our travel buddies Ted and Carol visited this month, and last weekend, in the rain that flooded basements (not ours, thankfully), raised rivers from the Gulf Coast to places even farther north than our south suburb of Chicago, and swept away houses along its track, we dug a "mess" of potatoes, washed them, boiled them, and ate them within an hour. The row of potatoes was beyond mud and mostly slurry, which made digging easier - and messier.

This weekend we bought fresh organic beets at the farmers' market, and decided to make borscht. We didn't have any potatoes, sprouted or otherwise, in the pantry, so we dug another mess. (I don't know why they are called a mess - it's somehow a rural collective noun. If we picked a couple quarts of beans, that would be a "mess" of beans. If we had okra this year, and picked enough to cut, bread, and saute, that would be a "mess." Yesterday I also picked a "mess" of green tomatoes, and we had fried green tomatoes with our borscht. We like vegetables.)

Because we didn't have any potatoes for the borwscht, I dug another mess, as I said before my long and parenthetical comment. The ones farthest away from the trees' shade were bigger, but none even half the size of my fist. I think we must have planted all fingerlings last spring because that's all that grew, so they couldn't grow very big in any event. We scrubbed them and used most of them in the borscht (2 C cooked beets, 2 C cooked potatoes, 2 Tbs. chopped cooked leeks, 1 quart or so of home made chicken broth, salt and pepper to taste. Combine, bring to rolling boil, blend [I use an immersible blender]. Put in bowls, top with a dollop of sour cream. Enjoy.)

We'll enjoy the potatoes we didn't use boiled with butter and dill tomorrow, and in a pot roast today. They tend to be much smaller and a few of them are misshapen. One looks like a platypus with little knobs pushing out in every direction. Ann was sorry it didn't look like Jesus, because we could sell it on e-bay.

Maybe next year.

As always, I welcome your comments.