I loved growing and digging potatoes! I mainly grew sweet potatoes, but I did grow others. if they weren't a sweet potato then they were some other specially style .
All were extremely flavorful, but the sweet potatoes were just absolutely fantastic! I always had to double wrap my sweet potatoes when I baked them! If not, there be syrup bubbling out and making a mess!
I really only grew sweet potatoes because of my Mom. Well really, what she did! She had told me she wanted to plant
some sweet potatoes in my garden. Well, her idea of
some, was a
whole lot! IT remember if it was three or four varieties but there were 50 slips each!
I had a pretty big garden but I definitely hadn't planned for that many sweet potatoes! So I had to plow up some additional area. It had been under a heavy cover crop production for I think three years at that point. I plowed it up and made rows of mounds. I didn't think I was ever going to finish planting those slips!
Rains were actually pretty good that year and I only had to irrigate very sparsely. Just a crazy amount of growth! All very good production, but I had one strain that I got to very last in harvesting. The potatoes got extremely large on the average. I had a few examples that were the size of footballs! Yeah really ridiculously large. Naturally I assumed that they would be very stringy. Naturally those sizes are going to be too big to bake, so I would use them to make candied sweet potatoes. And our office Christmas party, I told everyone that I would bring sweet potatoes for my dish and would only use one potato. Everyone laughed and thought it was pretty funny. I do have to say those potatoes were extremely delicious! And absolutely not a bit of stringiness at all. I knew there would be doubters so I took pictures! I took them before and during the cutting-up process!
Even after letting my uncle take what he could and sell to the grocers and locally I still had so many potatoes that I had to build a friggin root cellar! Not only were the varieties that mom picked out were very productive, they had very nice skins on them that made them Keep extremely well! The person that advised her own selection did quite good!
I had an immigrant from India buy a place next door and he gave me some potato strains from India that were actually quite good and grew extremely well! He bought a place to grow Indian style vegetables only. he had a well drilled and that's all he did with the property is grow vegetables. I'm surprised he wasn't organic, but his property had been a peanut field for quite a few years. At least that one had been grown without any of the nasty herbicides and pesticides. They did use chemical fertilizers but they also returned the peanut hay back to the soil after the harvest.......................... The farmer did let me grab quite a bit of that peanut hate to make some really nice compost.
That's got me so hungry for potatoes now it's pathetic!