Potatoes!

Kind of like hunting for Easter eggs in dirt, or bobbing for apples in dirt, or finding buried treasure (in dirt) or....you get the picture. For folks with little (aka no) knowledge of how to grow potatoes, we haven't done too bad.

Tho the plants have gone from lush.....

 ...to dying in the last week as a result of - weather/disease/insects?   

We won't get nearly the crop that we thought we would.  I've already pulled up several plants that had died with loads of little (marble sized) tots on the roots.  I think we will be doing some research as to what went wrong before we plant again next fall.  And I definitely won't be doing the straw thing again.  I'd rather just dig in the dirt :)

  

For the record....the straw was how we decided to 'hill up' our potatos.  Pototoes grow up from the original spud along the trunk of the plant and have to be covered as the plants grow as light causes the spuds to turn green and become toxic.  Many people recommended planting shallow and using straw to mound over the plants as they grow.  By using straw (so the theory goes) you don't have to dig in the dirt to get to the potatoes.  But we found NO potatoes growing in the straw, just a few (tho very nice) in the dirt.   Not sure why it doesn't work for us but it was messy and kind of a pain anyway, so we will try another method next year.