The Curtain Opens...

Once again, potatoes have been very much on my mind -- unfortunately, not in a good way. Early last spring we planted some twenty or so pounds of nine varieties of seed potatoes which we harvested, with great pride, in July.  Washed, sorted, divided into cute baskets and labeled -- a very satisfying project.  They looked like this:

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Bruce and I are hearty potato eaters.  We ate them all summer long, and anyone who visited the house had to leave with a bag of them.

Fast forward five months, and lift up the little curtain in front of the cupboard to reveal...a cheerful army very vigorously sprouting potatoes. 

Ay yi yi!    

 

To be honest, I've known for some time what was slowly happening behind that little curtain, but had neither the time nor the will to do anything about it.  Things finally came to a head last weekend when we were doing a pre-Thanksgiving shopping at Costco.  We stood in front of a large bin of sacks and sacks of unsprouted potatoes.  Bruce looked at me and I looked at him.  And then we put a bag of russets in our cart.

Which left me to finally have to confront my own eagerly sprouting spuds.  We definitely didn't want to eat them and it was too early in the season to plant them.  So I trundled them off to the compost heap where Bruce raked compost over them.  Who knows?  Maybe some of them will thrive in there -- I hope so.  If not, they'll make good compost.

Funny how even when things work out perfectly right, they still can go off the tracks.  Perhaps next spring I won't plant quite so many...