Potatoes

It’s been hard to find time this spring to fit in a solid weekend of gardening, so when swim class was unexpectedly cancelled last night, I took advantage of the sunbreak and the free hour and decided to put in our potatoes. I know I’m supposed to wait a few days after cutting the seed potatoes up, but, like I said, I’m squeezing every moment out of my days right now, so I sat down at the kitchen table to prep.

My usual go to is just to plant the whole potato, but Forrest prefers to cut them into sets, where each potato is cut into three or four pieces, each piece featuring an eye from which the plant will grow. That way, you maximize the number of plants per seed potato. (Like most things gardening related, there’s some (okay, a lot) of debate about how to prep seed potatoes. And like most things Serenity-related, I do what I feel like doing at the time and it usually works out.)

One of my girls sat down to talk to me about her Roblox game while I was working, which is actually a perfect amount of multi-tasking, because having something to draw some attention away from the mind-numbing details of Roblox is conducive to a better listening experience for everyone. After five or so minutes, she emerged from her bubble of video game trivia and noticed what I was doing.

“Ugh,” she said, “Why are you cooking those gross old potatoes?”

‘I’m not, I’m planting them. They’re old because we want them to be ready to grow new plants.”

“Eww, what are those weird things growing out of them?” she pointed to the sprouts.

Here’s where I paused. This child has been surrounded by gardens and growing things her whole life. When she was three, we dug up the front yard. This summer, we’re rototilling half the backyard so she and her sisters will stop planting random plants in my garden. How does she not know how potatoes are grown?

Then I realized that her interaction with the garden never - and I mean never - starts until it gets warm and dry outside. So, she’s very used to setting out starts, weeding, and definitely harvesting. But all of my kids have carefully avoided the early spring planting, since it’s full of mud and rain and damp, cold hours.

Not that I can blame them. The only one in the house who will go anywhere near the compost is Forrest. To me, it’s a magical substance that somehow makes its way into my garden beds each fall. And if you ask him to spend more than a few minutes weeding, he’ll find some large project that definitely needs doing immediately. I guess we each do what we feel like doing at the time and between all of us, it usually works out.