Growing Potatoes: Are They Friend or Foe?

This is not the first year I have grown my own potatoes. But it is the first year I grew such a large variety of them. I mean, I don't even know how many varieties, I grew. Here are some:

• Red potatoes
• Yukon Gold
• Russian banana fingerlings
• Rose fingerlings
• Russet

I know there were more, but the names are lost to the winds of the garden.

I waited and watched, took pictures of the beautiful (and fragrant!) flowers, watered, fertilized and gave them love.

I harvested some as new potatoes. Roasted them in the oven and mashed some...I harvested the rest as mature potatoes and did the same. I even froze some of the mashers so I would have them this winter.

And here's what I know now...I am not so sure I like all kinds of potatoes, as I thought I did. Yes, I know that is shocking...to me, too. But I grew to dread harvesting and preparing my potatoes. Here's why...some of them were so (fill in the blank with hard fleshed, watery, dry) that I had many potato failures over the course of the summer.

I mean, how can that be? We are talking about potatoes here, people. This is not brain surgery. The only consistent result was that I had inconsistent results.

Now, it is easy to say that I should have paid more attention to what I was planting and should have thought about the preparation in relation to that. But, hey, it just never occurred to me that I would have this much of a challenge with preparation.

Next year, I suppose I will have to be more careful with my selections and recipes. Who knew that a tuber I have loved so much would cause me to call our whole history together in to question?