Wee baby taters....

We are finally getting around to planting!  I know its been a while since I made a true gardening post...but I was getting around to it.  It seems that spring fever has hit every one in the house...our cat Buster has been tormented by the return of the spring birds.  Noah and Owen seem particularily spastic these days.  And Chester...he looked at me the other day and said "hummph....I wanna grow some stuff."

So of course I obliged!  We discovered some of our potatoes were starting to grow eyes.  I was instantly transported back to preschool days and the thought occured to me to grow some potato plants!  It was definitely in my mind to grow potatoes this year.  We've never done it.  I'm not entirely sure why!  After reading Cam Mather's book the All-You-Can-Eat Gardening handbook, I discovered that it truly is a wonder food!  The UN declared the potato as THE food that can be grown in almost any condition on almost every continent.  It's packed with nutrients...so much so that Chris Voigt just completed his own personal challenge 20 POTATOES A DAY for 60 days!  You can check out his adventure at his website...

http://www.20potatoesaday.com/

Its a funny site that definitely delivers the nutritional goods.  Well worth a visit for those of you who need an excuse or two to eat way more potatoes.  It even features 21 different potato recipes.

In the meantime, I thought I would share with you what we did with our eyed potatoes.



baby tater plants - March 18-2011

Simply put, these are just wrinkly taters from the bag, stuck with toothpicks and set into mason jars with water.  Remember day care days?  or preschool experiments?  Same thing...only we're going to plant these suckers and hopefully have a great crop of taters!  We'll also start some more in a few weeks....that way we aren't flooded with potatoes...faster than we can eat them!  Tha'ts called staggering your crop.

We'll be checking back in with these little guys soon enough....they've already grown quite a bit since I took this picture!  Ches also brought home some baby red potatoes...so we'll try to get them going as well.

Next post:  Starting the peppers....