1 Potato 2 Potato

Growing up in Oregon everyone had a garden. My best friend Marcia's family had a big garden that we took the liberty of playing in and eating from. I loved carrots fresh from the garden all warm and still a little dirty. They were so sweet and earthy. But one of my favorite things fresh from the garden is tiny potatoes. Thin skinned and crisp. I can just brush the dirt off them and eat them out of my hand. Of course I also can think of 100 other ways to prepare them. 

This year Mr. Ramon and I have our first garden together. I have not grown potatoes since I was a girl and I didn't do any of the planting - mostly the eating. So together we picked out two types to grow. A small white potato and a small red potato. We decided to go with the method that seemed the easiest - potato bags. 

Potato Bags are nylon pots that you plant your potatoes in then add dirt continually as they grow until the dirt is to the top. They have handy little openings on the sides so you can harvest potatoes when they are young. We did not know a lot about growing potatoes so the employee at Sky Nursery told us to just us regular soil and not to feed them. Sounds about right if you think about where potatoes flourish - Idaho and Ireland. Lots of dirt. We were excited to see them grow big and bushy. 

All of a sudden while Mr. Ramon was out of town one of our plants started to go yellow. I remembered that they were supposed to flower at some point and they had not yet. This could not be good. I was worried and scoured the internet for potato plant disease. I was sure we had failed in some capacity. To much rain, not enough sun......

Well Mr. Ramon came home and I showed him our plant. He quickly said "maybe we have some potatoes?" He shoved his hand into the side pocket, dug around a bit and pulled out a small white potato. 

I was so excited!! We have potatoes - we may not have many and I am still unsure of what happened to our plant but we harvested what we had.

We took this little guy inside and washed him off. I then sliced him and sprinkled him with salt. I was in heaven. Crunchy and starchy. So tasty. 

So now we put these new potatoes to use - smashed, roasted, potato salad. Looks like there will be potato recipes coming your way!