Harvest time at the Taylor home; dud spuds

Harvest time is here, and I’ve murdered another garden. This year it was potatoes. I’m not sure what I did wrong, but what came out of the ground was not nearly as good as what I put in. The same thing happened last year, only with banana peppers.

Every spring, it’s the same story; the snow melts, temperatures rise, the sun shines. All these spring things give me a confidence I have no business possessing.

Spring says, “Go ahead! Plant something. It’ll be different this year. You can do it. Trust me.”

Spring is a lying schmuck.

But somehow I always find myself in my garden hoeing out last autumn’s weeds and laying down whatever crop seems like a good idea at the moment. Like I said, this past spring that crop was ‘taters.

I’ve never grown potatoes, but I have eaten them. I figured what the heck. How hard can it be?

Not knowing anything about growing spuds, I went to my father-in-law—a real farmer with a real centennial farm—for advice.

“Well,” said Big John, speaking slowly so I’d understand. “You dig up the ground, plant the seed potatoes a couple inches down, spread some fertilizer (this turned out to be chicken shit), and give ‘em plenty of water. You’ll have potatoes come the end of August.”

Big John made it sound easy, and he should know; he has about 30 bazillion acres of potato plants growing on his property, all of which seem to be producing big, healthy tubers.

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor pointed out (repeatedly) that potatoes cost only a few bucks for a whole bag, and that if I was really serious about saving money, we could get as many as we wanted free from Big John. She also commented that a backyard flower garden would look a whole lot prettier than a weedy plot of potatoes.

I was having none of that nonsense, though. If ‘taters are good enough for Big John, they’re good enough for me.

I picked up a bag of seed potatoes, which, it turns out, are just little, teeny ‘taters, about an inch around. The idea, as explained to me, is that the diminutive spuds send forth shoots that turn into other potatoes, all of which grow to prodigious size and delicious taste.

Under a gauzy blanket of spring sunshine, I bent my back to my postage stamp-sized plot of land and in a few hours, the potatoes were in the ground.

I watered. I weeded. I fertilized. I waited.

Soon, shoots broke the surface, growing knee-high in a matter of weeks.

I watered, I weeded, I fertilized. I waited.

Mrs. T noted that with the money I was spending on water and fertilizer, I could buy a sizeable amount of stock in the Frito-Lay Corporation and be set for potatoes for the rest of my life.

Weeks passed and I continued to water, though I weeded less often and fertilized not at all. Eventually, the weeds grew as high as the potato plants. By the end of July, watering started to seem like a lot of work. It would rain eventually, I figured.

Finally, a week or so ago, I went out to harvest my crop. Pushing the weeds aside, I dug up the first plant.

There, on the end of the scrubby, three-foot-tall bush, was a potato only slightly smaller than the “seed potato” I had planted three months earlier.

Not only had it not sent forth shoots to grow more potatoes, it had not even grown itself! I dug up another plant, then another. Same story all the way down the line.

Unwilling to admit defeat, I took my crop of acorn-sized potatoes (all 28 of them) back into the house. Mrs. Taylor watched as I washed them and placed them on a paper towel to dry.

She said nothing. She often says nothing, even when it would give her great pleasure to speak.

We had mashed potatoes with dinner. Two bites each.

Next year, I’m growing flowers.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.